The number of possible ways of playing the first 4 moves per side in a game of chess is 318,979,564,000!!
Source: Daily Times
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Amazing!
There are several ways to destroy chess.
That is a VERY BIG number. According to a well known move generators test called “perft”
from the initial position we have the following legal moves.
depth nodes totalnodes
1 20 20
2 400 420
3 8902 9322
4 197281 206603
5 4865609 5072212
6 119060324 124132536
7 3195901860 3320034396
Total possible moves after move#4 is only 206603.
Even the total after move#7 is smaller than the number in the article.
This is such an inane comment. Its like saying there are a million possible im which I can bungle up writing this simple sentence
(number of ways = 26 to the power of number of characters typed in this sentence) but that does not mean this is such a difficult task.
Tsk tsk.. looking back at my sentence maybe it *is* a difficult task! 🙂
I am a math guy and my immediate reaction was the number is way to big for the correct answer. It just can not be that large.
Nikolai I think your numbers are for half moves. I am sure it was meant that both sides make 4 moves or 7 ply so you need to go to 8 ply to reach 4 moves. your table goes to 7 ply.
so maybe the article is correct. WOW a big number very quickly.
I arrive at perfit value of 88 319 013 352 at 8.
It looks like the article is going to perfit(9) instead of perfit(8).
perfit(9) would be the number of moves after the first 4 full moves on the chess board.
I do not fully understand it all. here is some info.
http://www.albert.nu/programs/sharper/perft.htm
I am fairly positive the article number is too high for the first 4 moves. I think it represents the first 5 moves by both sides.