🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <x-290494195514@adviser.bham.ac.uk>, Royston <x@y> wrote:
>Seeing that the number of possible moves in the game of chess is finite,
>why can't a database of all possible positions be set up and associated
>winning trees kept? This way instead of a computer having to 'think' it
>would simply just look and respond.

Well, Chess is an extremely hard problem to solve, while it MAY be
finite.  Finding "all possible moves" is impossible in our limited
lifetimes.  If there are (say) 25 possible moves at any moment, and the
average chess game lasts (say) 20 moves each for black and white, you've got
to look at approximately 25^40 chessboards, which is somewhere around
82718061255302767487140869206996285356581211090087890625.  This number is
over 100000000000000000000000000 times larger than the number of seconds
that have passed since the (theoretical) beginning of the universe 20
billion years ago.  So checking every possible move is not feasible.
This represents just all the possible moves for a single game...
imagine how many possible games there can be...the permutations
MAY be finite, but hardly anywhere near the magnitude we can handle.

I guess the root of the problem, to the type of solution you propose
is, there is not any computer fast enough to come up with such
a database in less than geological time, and there is not enough
storage for such a database...on earth at this time.

-Roger
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bix: ruzun
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