How many chess games are possible? - Numberphile
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- čas přidán 28. 05. 2024
- Dr James Grime talking about the Shannon Number and other chess stuff.
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this guy looks like he smokes math
Alex Pătraru that was my joke
No he smokes A TON OF METTHHHHHHH
Alex Pătraru pls dont comment again
top illin you might be onto something
Alex Pătraru that, was just totally pathetic.
in the distant future: "and it is as of move 11,000 we have a completely new game."
-agadmator
Lol
🤣🤣🤣
This comment deserves soooo many more likes.
and both players are still in their home preparation
@peter Solomon it is almost correct, 50 moves without taking any piece. After 50 moves without it it is a draw.
My chess skill is so low that i have most likely played games of chess that will never be repeated by another human being
Mac Boulden actually Everyone probably has, by the middle game the game is unique usually
Most likely. For two players to play the same game of chess is as unlikely as two people hitting the jackpot at same time
@@owenmckenzie962 also in the start when he really does not study some openings
mircea tim true
It is highly unlikely that any two games of chess have ever been repeated beyond a certain amount of moves. If your chess skill were truly awful you would have been caught out by fools mate on multiple occasions! :P
7:34 "Some of those games are nonsense games, you can win in one move but you move other pieces" - I feel personally attacked!!!
don't worry, the opponent will move other pieces the next move, it won't be checkmate.
i bet your opponent's king doesnt :D
@@mikezinj BURNED!
haha, when he said that, i was like "So you mean most chess games?"
Here's a co-incidence: As i was reading ur comment, the same line came up on the video
That queen sacrifice at 3:40 was delicious.
+adrian5b The immortal game Anderssen-Kieseritzky June 21, 1851.
Agreed. Awesome.
Wow, I didn't notice that ! Thanks!
castling woud work
You can`t castle out of check.
0:27 how to get extra sentences on a test
lol how is this not top comment
I don't get it. Please explain.
It took me 0.29 minutes to get
MLG Gaming so a little under 20 seconds?
Yes
3:39 Can we just appreciate this queen sacrifice
It's the most famous checkmate in history. The game is called the Immortal Game and was played between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky in 1851.
Yeah I was watching and thinking “???” until the magic moment
Oh no my queen
@@sarahdumby c h e c k m a t e
It is a very known mate pattern
The game being played is “The Immortal Game” Adolf Anderssen v. Lionel Kieseritzky, London 1851
Agadmator has covered the game. I recognized that checkmate!
Thanks.
Oh is this what it is? They use it for the game in Dragon Age Inquisition, I wasn't aware it was based on another one.
Absolutely gorgeous
@@KedarOthort It's also used in the original Blade runner. I used to play a lot that opening too, it's the bishop gambit and it's a lot of fun in lower levels.
Move 4 there are 197000 different possible games. 90% of games I play 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6.
then its Bishop A5
@@KanishkMalkan You bet
*B5
and A6
I like playing king's and queen's gambit, any1 else?
... I almost said depends on the size of the board. I'm an idiot sometimes.
Erik István Fejes..... gg
hahahaha, lol
Technically it does but there is a standard size they are using in this video.
no it doesnt. no matter how big/small the chess board is the number of squares are still the same
Same,
The interesting question is - as the game goes on - the number of pieces goes down (as some are captured) - but the number of spaces they can move into without some obstruction INCREASES...understanding which of those two things happens to the greatest extent would inform us as to whether Shannon's number is an over-estimate or an under-estimate.
We may never know most computers will crash with all of this info, and we need a super genius to code thus
@darknightoftroy you sir have started to explore the code.. would love to crack the real answer with you 👍👏
Gond question
197 742 possible games after 4 moves... and only 36 of them are possible Bongcloud openings. We really need to have more opening theory.
I see a man of culture
Two men of culture and one of them is 1 day ago? Wonderful
how is it only 36 games? Should be much more no?
@@occultsymbols it s always e4 (or e3) first, so...
Who needs theory when you can russian roulette pawns? 😎
"This was in passing."
Or... En passant?
Weird Stuff I wonder how many chess players don't understand that. 😏
Coley Amos Normal people won’t. Chess nerds like us... we’ll smile.
🤓
Coley Amos 😂😂😂
I remember learning this rule as a kid (I had a copy of some edition of Hoyle's Rules lying around the house). Unfortunately, game rules only really count when both players agree on them as I quickly found out, so I've gotten in the habit of asking people I haven't played against if they're familiar with _en passant._ If no, I explain it to them and ask if they want to have a game where it's a legal move or not. I'm happy to play either way.
There are only two possible chess games, actually. The one where I blunder my queen, and the kind that occurs much less frequently.
hahaha
I usually sacrifice my king for the win.
You sacrifice your king ummmmq
de minimis OMG, that's actually a brilliant tragedy
lul
Yeh the kind where i look three moves ahead and the other where i get bored/distracted and give my queen accidental suicide by move 5
The game he shows is the immortal game between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky 1851, btw.
Was looking for this comment LOL 😂 a true chess fan
Damn i really thought like wtf why does white just lost the Bishop and both rooks completely unprompted
And I was gonna say the queen but then..
Bishop e7 mate
3:12 "it was only IN PASSING"
that had to have been a purposeful choice of words
9:15
en crossaint
r/anarchychess losing their minds
EN PASSANT
Me: How many are possible games?
Doctor Strange: 10^120
Me: In how many I won against my dad?
Doctor Strange: None
F
F
F
F
F
I wasn't aware of how 10^120 was guesstimated. :)
Nice video... *shared*
What you're missing is that "possible chess games" do not exist in the physical world the same way water does. 99.9.....infinite 9s.....999% of these games will never be played and therefore do not exist in physical space, they are only theoretical possibilities. Therefore, it is possible for "possible" number chess games to exceed a number of mass in the universe
hey chessnetwork :) how did you enjoy the king's gambit as an example?
the video specified "observable universe." we have no idea how large the entirety of the universe is or if it is measurably large.
Yeah... There is a big difference between the theoretically infinite expanse of space vs "the observable universe". The observable universe is absolutely finite because we can only see so much of it.
"The Universe, however, is infinite and spans far and endless, and
therefore, there is no way there are more games of Chess possible than
atoms in the Universe"
He said visible atoms in the universe. Also, we don't know if the Universe is infinite, do we?
The universe of possible chess games includes some marvelous games that have never been played. Every so often, two people get together and try to find one of them.
That’s a great sentence thank you sir!
@@tarabinsurzo You are welcome.
Underrated comment
7:33 is a pretty accurate description of my chess experience
Nicolas Terbeek unoriginal
This guy definitely takes sugar in his tea.
cocaine*
pop9095 Er, did you respond in the right thread?
woo hoo I take honey baby 😘
uk
I take cyanide in my tea.
My favourite numberphile guy.
Mine too...
Mine too...
Mine too...
+Anonyymi same
+Flavio Andrade C-C-C-Combo breaker!
As the games approach the ~11,800 move limit the number of additional variations will be decreasing. So, you can count the number to the halfway point then mirror it to the end for a better estimate.
So many possible games, but only one of them has ever and will ever truly *THROBBED* .
Xqc is still recovering from that day
@@sammylahmeda7271 yes by later winning 6 and 0 in pogchamps
2021
@@guts1859 Someone is burnt
The captions misspelled "googols" as "Googles". I blame the company.
@@MetalRaydown Yes, it was. Google owns CZcams, and CZcams makes a net loss.
I am the 69th like
@@henryambrose8607 Google doesn't own CZcams. Alphabet owns both.
@@DaviniaHill This video was uploaded before alphabet was a thing and when google owned youtube so the captions were probably generated then
"Google" the company was also a misspelling of "Googol" so we've come full circle
10^120 is called 1 Novemtrigintillion btw.
I just looked this up and it's actually true, haha!
No its nontrigintillion
Nvm
Tflolhahafacts
r/iamverysmart
“If you had a computer trying to work out the the future of the game and all the legal moves and where the game would go, it would never make a move“
So that's why Windows 7 chess lvl 10 wouldn't ever do anything
Because computers were too slow at the time, do a virtual machine on your PC now and it might go
30^80 = 10^x
80 * log 30 = x
80 * ( log 10 + log 3 ) = x
80 * ( 1 + log 3 ) = x
log 3 is approximately 0.5 since sqrt 10 is approximately 3.1
80 * ( 1 + 0.5 ) = x
80 * 1.5 = x
120 = x
Therefore, 30^80 = 10^120
I am a physics undergrad and i play chess casually and this is the exact question that came to my mind today. So thanks to youtube algorithm for reading my mind and recommendation.
Same, but only 1 week after this was recommended to me. Rly how?
anapolis HA lol I love you already XD
what are the chances? Blessings
CZcams read my mind many times... Really sometime i couldnt sleep thinking how CZcams know whats in my mind.
I am sure I din google it at all!!
The odds of a single game of chess being played out of all possibilities: 10^120
Odds of CZcams algorithm getting something correct: 10^100000000000
This guy looks like Fred and George Weasley's long lost triplet
I thought that the first time I ever saw him
I was thinking; Pee wee Hurmans brother
Mixed with Michael Fassbender. He looks like a wimpy Fassbender.
No wonder his face's familiar
🤣🤣🤣🤣
0:29 a paper"how to program a computer to play chess" and it was on how to program a computer to play chess,
...
😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣
After the first two moves (where there are already 400 possible games) you can’t get an accurate number of permutations through simple multiplication because a position where - a Rook has an open file, or a Bishop has an open diagonal across the board, or a Queen has either - has more legal moves than a position where those pieces are smothered or pinned to the King.
And you’ll occasionally get a position where a King is in check and there is only one or two legal moves
True but die to quantum mechanics it actually increases the number because the game goes on for longer . But nice thinking .
And then you get into situations where a different move order produces the same board. 1. e4, e5 2. d4, d5 produces the same board as 1. d4, d5. 2. e4, e5... or 1. d4, e5. 2 e4, d5. etc.
So, in other words, the variables are so many and entangled that it would take aliens with some crazy technology to calculate that 😅
Now imagine the number of possible StarCraft games.
Or League of Legends :0
27182818284590452354e-19 Gaming is not really incredible since it was a factor for all games in that get popular is replayability
***** You could say the exact same thing for board games
There are infinite variations of those games. Even when considering ticks for the server to register something and truncated float values that limit the number of inputs, hardware itself causes infinite variations to exist.
BrackenWood I wonder how many ARAM combinations there are?
Yay, I missed James!
Me too:')
Dixavd Have you subscribed to singingbanana, Dr. Grimes's CZcams channel? It's got tons of math(s) on it.
ZipplyZane I have - but he uploads so infrequently... only 3 in the past 12 months! Nonetheless, every time I see him in my Subscription feed is a joy.
Don’t worry i’m back, oh wait
Fun fact: The chess game numberphile showed was in fact the immortal game played by Anderssen.
What an excellent video! Loved it lads
'In passing' I see what u did there.
Pls no
SilverHound 7
En passant?
Buddy Clem Yep it’s En Passant
@@visorkatossa pls yes
Yet Carlsen played almost the same exact game 10 friggin times against karjakin
The speedster You have said ALMOST,but not the same.
Did someone say Ruy Lopez?
And most recently against Caruana.
@@marcozapata6984 they should become artists, they are way better at drawing
Thats because any playstyle can be countered.
Here is a more interesting question: "How many games of chess are there where neither side makes any mistakes"?
One
Or maybe it's none, if we accept that if you do not win, you must have made a mistake. There will always be at least one player who did not win, and therefore has made a mistake.
@@eoghan.5003 No, you misunderstood. By "making a mistake" I mean make a move that changes the optimal outcome from your perspective from "winning" to "draw", or from "draw" to "losing". So if you are already losing (with best play of your opponent), then by definition you cannot "make a mistake".
@@cihant5438 To get that answer, one would have to mathematically solve chess as a game, which I think is several (or many) years away. Maybe quantum computing and AI will make it possible.
The answer could well be one, assuming that there is never a situation where multiple moves can be considered equally correct, which I'm not sure is possible, given that you can have a knight in a position such that it can move to two different squares and still be "attacking" one common square, for example.
@@cihant5438 Is that not the premise I work from in my first reply? The result would be many many games where neither makes a mistake.
Awesome video! It was very educational and entertaining!
Thanks for this video Numberphile. I have recommended this video on my recent video comments. I have been addicted to playing chess for over 30 years!. It is a game that provides constant fascination to me. There is an old Indian proverb about the game which relates to this video a bit : "Chess is a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe". Cheers, K
kingscrusher many thanks - and great quote
kingscrusher Yes, KC!
OMG KC!
Love your channel and numberphile's as well
kingscrusher Lots of chess players watching Numberphile, methinks!
kingscrusher KC my man. best chess channel on youtube
math + chess = perfect
Agree
Plus music
Cheth
Chess ⊆ Math
Is chess related to science?
0:35 ...it was about how to program a computer to play chess.
Hmmm... The floor here is made out of floor.
asdf hjkl 🤷♂️
Haha a meme
I’ve seen two of the number phone guys speak live now and they’re absolutely brilliant and completely hilarious, an honour
He needs to prove it by taking picture of every possible different sets.
There are no matter enough in the universe to do it
Anigame He could do it with one board though
I mean he would die first but
Sicky 😂😂
@@Phoenix-kv3ou Never mind the boards. There wouldn't be enough matter in the known universe to contain all the pictures.
@@sietsejohannes Ok, and I would order you to check if there's any set missing.
Most games of chess would be extremely long games, as the number of possible sequences increases exponentially with the length of the game.
Consider games where players cooperate to maximize the length of the game, by advancing pawns and/or capturing pieces only every 49.5 moves, with the minimum 8 pawn captures to allow all the pawns to pass each other and advance, these games all last 5949 moves. If we assume there's an average of 20 non-capture non-pawn non-mate moves each ply during those games, the number of possible sequences would be ~20^5949 or about (10^1.3)^5949 or about 10^7740.
Certainly Godfrey Hardy wasn't invoking the 50 move rule when he came up with his figure. I suspect his estimate was based on an estimate of the number of possible positions constraining the length of the game through the 3 move rule. That's a lot more difficult to calculate. One article I found cited 4.1529*10^40 possible positions. This caps the number of possible sequences below 10^(10^42).
Dr.Bishop : I have seen trillions of possibilities of chess game but we win only one time
its so cool to think that i have played one of those games and nearly each time i play a different game discovering more of these possibilities
You had Anderssen-Kieseritzky playing in the background! (Anderssen's immortal). Nice choice of game!!
Noticed that too! Lovely!
Yeah I recognized it when kf1 was played... ingrained in my brain
And even more astonishing than the dead numbers: Magnus Carlsen (chess GM and current king of chess) said that he sometimes remembers a board and knows what to do because he played it already before.
Fleshcut He's a robot from space
Yago Duppel Yes that's true, it's not at all unusual. I'm a 1700 player and I also parrot a lot of theory, sometimes into the 20's! In fact one of the most amazing recent preparations was David Navarra against Radoslaw Wojtaszek in which he apparently knew the whole game up until move 25 when he moved his king to f6 as white! Move 25 per se is not impressive for a GM but bringing your king to f6 as per said preparation is.
Fleshcut That's because in reality chess games aren't as diverse as in theory, because there're strategies and counter-strategies in act which means the possible moves are greatly reduced. There are still many possibilities in this case and it's a great feat to recognize those patterns, but its humanly possible.
tgwnn A lot of GMs, I'm told, when playing weaker opponents will make slightly inferior early moves in order to get off of well known lines in the anticipation that their opponent has memorised the theory. Not sure if that is actually true, but it seems to make sense. Have you ever encountered this?
tgwnn Wow, that's an awesome answer, thanks. And grats on punishing that guy!
3:11
*MATHS IS THE NEW WEED*
Close to π
@@evetheeevee2977 seems Legit
Maths is the new meth
Scientifically speaking it would be the new cocaine since high functioning professions etc prefer cocaine... not weed
When calculating the number of possible chess moves, do you also consider that each board posititon can be repeated twice before the game ends by threefold repetition? It's interesting to think about how in any position, multiple repetitions can be made that result in the same board position, in some cases, you couldn't replicate all possible moves of a given piece since the board would repeat more than twice and subsequently end.
It's really hard to calculate everything precisely
Now, the number of possible games on Hearthstone ? With 889 cards, it must be a HUGE NUMBER !!
Oh, wait, most of them are trash.
About 3 possibles games against secret pally.
You still play Hearthstone, right?
Wow! I *love* both chess and Numberphile, so this was a pleasure to watch!
I was already familiar with Claude Shannon's simplistic -yet eye-opening- calculation but I still learned a few things.
Now Brady we want a companion Computerphile episode series(!) about all those Minimax/Negamax variants and chess engine optimisations ;)
P.S. Cool and very "romantic" King's Gambit game. Does anyone know more details about it?
***** Oh, so that's why I was sure I had seen it somewhere! Thank you.
Shanon is a goofy estimate but the number would be way higher than that because some games go 120+ moves and some positions there is closer to 40-50 legal moves. Also amazing to think about in many positions there is only 1 move that dosnt lose or get checkmated
Agree - "all possible games" should include billions of games having 500+ moves.
Seriously just run a simulation of 1,000 games where legal moves are selected at random. See how many moves it takes on average to complete a game.
I was just thinking about this problem yesterday, now I see there’s a numberphile video about it
Very impressive....but how many Age of Empires games are possible?
Oooh.
Infinite, or nigh infinite given that the maps are randomly generated and the odds for two maps of the exact same size having their trees, resources and everything in the exact same positions is already astronomically high. I'm not sure but I think medium maps are 500x500. I'm not a mathematician but I learned something in high school that was about ordered positions where one spot is selected, therefore the next spot has to be any other spot, and so on till the final spot. I can't remember if is factorial or XchooseY or XpickY (yes there's a difference b/w pick and choose). So for simplicity sake I'm just gonna pretend it's factorial. So, the amount of possible positions on this 500 by 500 board is 500*500=250000 250000! (! Is factorial) that means 250000*249999*249998...all the way down to 1. For reference 25! is 15.5 septillion.
But let's say you only play on one custom made map that is the exact same every time and you also play as the same civilizations. Now you have to deal with game ticks, which generally are about 60hz (60 times per second). Now in order to count the amount of possible games you would need to determine the exact location of each unit, number of units, health of each unit, etc. 60 times every second for the entire game, which, from what I have seen, most competitive games last b/w 45minutes to 1h30minutes. Maybe you can say screw the tick rate for the position, given that the units cannot "land" between tiles at the end of a move. Keep in mind that I'm still missing variables such as building locations and the number of potential matches is already incalculable.
Even if it were a chess game on a 500x500 board with no obstacles (trees, water, etc. As so in age of empires) it would already be a preposterously large number. googolplex to the power of a googolplex or something insane like that. But to add in multiple tens or hundreds of specific variables that change potentially 60 times a second (speed of creating units for example), and multiply that by say 1 hour average? ... Although infinity is not achievable, this number would be indistinguishable from it. Probably something like (Planck time of the universe to the power of the Planck length of the universe) factorial
Ye but the RNG is likely seeded with a single 32 or 64 bit number
Like 10 until the enemy attacks you while your still spamming villagers to gather resources because they just spammed temple units the second they got to the second age and then you quit the game.
how many "wololo's" are possible?
Chuck Norris plays all variation twice a day
Go back to 2006, injun
Chuck Norris wins before the game even has started
But the only person capable of playing so many games is chuck norris which means he must be playing against himself which means he must have lost the most number of games in chess history.
@@dominicgallagher8930 chuck wins even if he loses. such is life.
Hahahahhahahahahhahaha
I love Dr. Grimes ever-present smile while talking about math.
Love the play through of the OG Immortal Game, makes me want to watch agad...
Now let's see him calculate the number of atoms in the observable Universe.
Its surprisingly easy to calculate, we know that a cubic meter of empty space contains on average about 6 protons and that the observable universe has a radius of 46 billion light years (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe) for a total volume of 4,0772e32 cubic light years.
One light year equals 9.461e+15 meters, so one cubic light year equals 8.468e+47 cubic meters, giving the observable universe a total volume of 3,452573e80 cubic meters. At 6 protons per cubic meters on average, you end up with approximately 2.07e81 proton in the universe. Now since only about 75% of all matter in the universe is Hydrogen (1 proton per atom), the total number of atoms will be a little lower, so perhaps around 1.5e81.
The thing that really struck me calculating this is that even if we add all the mass of all the stars in the universe, the number barely goes up.The problem is that although a star's density is much higher than empty space, they are so minuscule compared to the vastness of empty space filling the universe that their combines total weight is almost insignificant.
There are about 2e11 galaxies in the universe, each containing about that many stars, giving 4e22 stars in the universe. Our sun is a little bigger than the average star in the universe but we can still use it as a reference point. With a weight of 2e30 kg and mostly made of hydrogen, we can calculate that it contains about 1.2e57 atoms. Multiply that by the number of stars in the universe (4e22) and we get 4.8e79 atoms in all the universe's stars. Although this seem very close to the number 2,07e81 we had for all the mass of empty space, adding them both together bumps that number up by 0,048e81, which is about as small as the error margin for the calculation.
It's already been calculated. :)
Or the telescopes we use.
i always wondered how the observable univers can be more billions light years in radius big then the universe is old because the the groving of the univers must have been faster then light or did it .. ?
My head is rejecting input after thinking about these numbers...
Your picture fits great with your comment
Max Meraz I know right?
Frank R. Haugen I I have been in touch to Dragonite I am so sorry you
this is why you should play chess. you'll almost never end up with the exact same game
100x100x100 Rubix cube:
You under estimate my power
@@ottlight hello fellow cuber
"Almost"
laughs in scholar's mate
Tell that to the berlin drawers
In case you were wondering, the chess scenes that were peppered throughout the video came from Adolf Anderssen’s Immortal Game. I highly recommend you watch this game. It’s a brilliant example of romantic chess.
I ate my chessboard, it was stale mate.
" No it was NOT ! ! ! "
Yes it was, check mate.
@1:22 Whoa...when was the last you saw THAT variation of the King's Gambit? Jeez, what is this, 1851?
***** Well, that is the Immortal Game, which took place in 1851. :)
I think the best way of analyzing this would be getting a chess database that analyses how many possible moves there are on average on each turn. For example, there are always 20 options on move 1. But after that it depends. If you play A3, you’ll still have 20 options on your next move but if you play E3, now your bishop and queen can move so you have 28 combinations. If you get a database that analyses every game played (which wouldn’t be even near complete but at least it’ll give a much better range) and you get a number for options for every game. In this case for example, on move two, one game will have 28 options, other will have 20, and then you take all these numbers and get an average for the move 2. Than we’ll know for example, out of all the games that lasted 100 moves, how many options did they have on average per move. Then you can get a much more precise estimate. Then you find games that lasted hundreds of moves and calculate how many options they had on average and then you can estimate the rate of which the options will lower (for the game to be that big you’ll need pieces to be captured lowering the options) even in a game with over 10 thousand moves, there’ll be many options anyways because the kings are likely going to be far from each other and that by itself means they can each move to 8 different squares. Considering you need to have at least a king and a rook or a pawn for it not to be a draw, you can have up to 14 other options just by having a rook. Totaling 22 options even with only a rook and a king.
Longest chess game is like 8k moves also losing a peice doesn't necessarily lower options either
@@uuproverlord8324The longest chess game possible is 5898 moves.
Also. The example you used in the video is the Immortal game as well. Very nice!
I love this kind of stuff
I see you using the Immortal Game as your chess animation ;)
Killian Defaoite That's right
Most of the games would be just a ton of blunders
Szczur01 but if you think about it, every game that is not drawn contains some kind of blunder. Although I get your point - most of these games would be all silly moves
Jonte Friedrichsen thats actually not true, otherwise when Googles alphazero played against itself (best chess entity in the world) it would have always drawn, but thats not the case.
@@hermannihietalahti4818 even alphazero plays inaccuracies, otherwise it wouldn't be getting verifiably better. Chess isn't solved in closed form yet.
@@FreeZeon1 drawn game also has a blunder (both players missed something) becouse you didn't won.. the main goal i chess is to win a game, so everything else is the blunder...
@@TheVesper00 drawn games occur in 2 forms. If both players play the best move possible, it will always end in a draw. If both players fail to take advantage of blunders, mistakes and inaccuracies equally, it will also end in a draw. The only games where one wins is where one person takes better advantage of such mistakes
There is a maximum of 132 moves that can be made on each turn. If the 1000-turn rule is there, then the maximum number of games is 132^1000 = about 3.74913 x 10^2120
My boy
Maths is like crack for this guy :D
Look at how bright his eyes are, the passion is flowing out of Dr. Grime!
Recorder guy said “that was the most wishy washy!” just as I thought the same.
For everyone who might not have known, the game shown at the beginning of the video (the queen sac at 3:35 ) the game is called "Immortal Game" and it is a real game played by Adolf Anderssen vs Lionel Liezeritsky back in the era when there was no idea of chess computers and players were never afraid to make sacrifices that seem unimaginable today because apparently the computers can refute it
The example game being played, by the way, is Anderssen vs Kieseritzky, 1851. Anderssen's Immortal Game. I liked his Evergreen Game better, though.
I like how one of Godfrey Hardy's biggest contributions to mathematics is discovering Ramanujan. Forget all his other achievements, he's famous for introducing the greatest mathematician of all time to the world!
Great comment. :)
You forgot Gauss and Euler.
@@noblerkin Ramanujan did what Euler did in a shack in India at the time of Colonial Rule. I think in this instance, we have to award 1 point to the Indians
I recall reading somewhere that Hardy himself said that discovering Ramanujan was his greatest contribution to mathematics.
@@changenoways9555 yeah also India started calculus trigonometry geometry navigation etc
Even chess invented in India
Mostly later appropriated by west later
That Andersen's game behind is just magic
Best explanation!!
8902/400 is pretty similar to 197,742/8902= about 22.13ish. This suggests a pattern. If you calculated one or two more steps to get a really accurate decimal, then would the calculation be:
197,742/8902(multiplier)x11,800!(possible number of games)
Which equals:
2.06274285385227894242625743373618656671452552174656780709750617838687935295439227139968546394068748x10^42927
Or something like that.
6:42 The rule states that if both sides have insufficient material to do a checkmate, then it is automatically a draw.
9:15 that's an amazing pun and I don't even think James realized it
Magnus : wow that's bigger than my elo
I could never be a mathematician. The sound of markers on paper drives me nuts.
Joshua Pearce Haha, well, there's no rule that mathematicians HAVE to make Numberphile videos.
Joshua Pearce Tip: Do not use markers on paper
Joshua Pearce Your low IQ would make it pretty difficult also, lol.
Chess Master That's just mean.
George Corley No, it's not just mean. It's also factual.
It feels weird to remember that I actually met James Grime in person in Helsinki, got on stage too. =D
He gave a great speech, although much of it was not new to me as things he discussed had been introduced on this channel.
Anston Music when was that? i was JUST in Helsinki
Anston Music cool beans. i'll probably never get to meet him
You can't know exact number from third move, because after first move (and second also, you can't block opposite sides squares on first move), every next move played has effect on next moves probable max count, meaning I can move bishop or knight on third move and numbers will change drastically starting from next move, till the end of sequence mentioned in video.
I want these numbers for our game Bollwerk 178. You have over 2000 options for the first move. It is great fun and very exiting!
7:18 Fit the set {(1, 20), (2, 400), (3, 8902), (4, 197742)} to an exponential fit of y=0.8995*e^(3.07x) with R^2=0.9999. So with your game limit of 11800, the number of games is y=0.8995*e^(36226), which google calculator confirms is infinity.
is this 10^8857.599?? i think right??
blake yes I think
The game shown is the andersson inmortal, which I just saw in Agadmators channel. Great youtube algorithms.
I just realized that this was the Immortal game of Anderssen where he sacced both his rooks and queen for mate
Magnus: i am the world champion
Supercomputer: hold my algorithm
Back in the 70s, I wrote a program to play chess. Even if you are only looking a few moves ahead, those numbers grow incredibly fast.
That first chess game, Brady sacrificed his queen and both his rooks and won the game!
+Justin Lew (MC Gamer) I don't remember from where but I swear I have seen that game from a famous grandmaster from history. He may have played it but I get the feeing it was borrowed from the romantic era of chess and it belongs to a GM of note (Andersson Maybe?). Still a cool video though!
Ryan Gonsalves yeah I recently realised it was a match between Adolf Andreessen and Kizertsky
amazing game :D
Yeah, his "immortal" game was pretty sick
I just realized the game you're showing while talking about the moves is the game Iron Bull vs Solas play of mental chess from Dragon Age Inquisition.
I'm sorry, James, you lost me when you explained the meaning of Claude Shannon's paper, "How To Program A Computer To Play Chess" -- could you walk us thru that explanation again a little bit slower?
;^}
and THIS is where quant computing would shine
4D chess
Great video.
Although I agree with the calculations, the more pieces that are captured as the game progresses, the less legal possible moves each player has. I'd argue around move 15-20, the possible moves drops back down significantly. With the rule applied with draws/repetitions/insufficient material etc I'd honestly say the amount of possible games is a fraction of 10^120.
Not always though, the emptier the board the larger the range of some pieces, so more possible moves.
If you really think about it, there are infintite number of chess games. By repeatedly moving bishops/knights to squares with periodic checks, you could have infinite number of turns and an infinite number of possibilites just by those 4 peices