🚀 go-pugleaf

> >>If you think we are going to search 10^50 positions, think again.
>
> Even just writing all those zeros once took about 5 minutes to get all the
> commas right!



   You have inadvertently discovered my point.

  An ancient version of Bob Hyatt might have
argued that no man could ever write out all the
zeroes (on a scroll) it took to merely represent
the number of possible chess positions or move
sequences, let alone begin to calculate a solution
to chess in his lifetime, even with an army of
helpers armed with an abacus apiece.

  Now, with a newfangled idea called scientific
notation, the modern version of Bob Hyatt can
write that number effortlessly in two seconds.
His notebook computer can outplay 99 percent
of all humans on Earth at chess, and the fact that
there is not enough wood in all the world to
manufacture sufficient numbers of a device called
an abacus is quite irrelevant to those assumptions
of the ancient version of the same man which
caused him to assume that it could _never_ be
done.  The abacus is not even considered as
relevant, and the army of helpers is useless, for
the task is assigned not to men, but to computers,
which are infinitely faster.

  No matter how many assumptions are made, the
problem itself has not changed in size or difficulty.

  Countless chessplayers went to their graves firmly
believing that it was impossible to win with Q vs.
two Bishops, because the obvious and direct
approach was ineffective.  Black sets us a fortress
which cannot be assailed.  But the computer
discovers a simple, clever, indirect method which
wins by force.  The assumption was that in order
to make progress (win), you had to attack, by
golly.  Fortunately, the computer was not limited
by an invalid assumption of the sort humans are
prone to make.  Let the enemy slowly destroy his
own fortress, the computer calculates, indifferently,
after calmly determining that a direct attack will
fail.  Why didn't I think of that, wonders the human?
Well, there was that nasty problem with an assumption....

   Now, why do you assume (there's that word again)
that there can never be a better way to handle a
problem which superficially appears to be too big for
the known universe, yet is finite in nature?

  I find particularly amusing the assumption that you
"know" the number of atoms in the universe, and that
there aren't enough of them to store every chess
position, so therefore, blah, blah.  It seems to me
that one could argue, just as you do, that it is
impossible to count the number of atoms in the
universe, and so therefore, blah, blah.

  Chess, in the sense of an endgame tablebase, is
finite.  The board is finite.  The number of pieces
is finite.  The number of legal moves in any given
position is finite.   What could be simpler?   :-)