#Chess move calculator how to#

The next move goes to Black who also has 20 possibilities to choose from. For the first move of chess, white has 20 legal moves to choose from. After each player has moved a piece 5 times each there are exactly 69,352,859,712,417 possible games that could have been played. Nonetheless, mathematicians have calculated at least for the first 5 rounds of moves (10 plies in total). The Exact Number Of Ways A Game Can Unfold For The First 5 Moves of ChessĪlthough Shannon estimated 10 120 no one knows for sure the exact number of ways a chess game can unfold simply because the number is so huge no one will invest the effort to calculate the exact number. And, since the average number of possible moves a single person can make is 30, the next thing Shannon needed to do is simply represent the sum of the possible games of chess as 30 80≈ 10 120 That will be 80 plies in total for both players. Now, the average game in a single chess match is worked out to be 40 moves long which is what Shannon suggested. We can take it even further to the 4th ply which is the second pair of turns and now we have 30 4= 810,000 games. Subsequently, if white makes another move, we have 3 total plies and that puts us at 30×30×30= 27,000 chess games. And, if both players make their move, we have 30×30= 900 possible games already. We now know that on average there are 30 legal moves each side can make. Take any random position from any of your chess games and count how many legal moves each side has. Take for this illustrative example below:īlack to move has 37 possibilities to choose from After some intense thinking, he noticed that on average, in any position, there are about 30 legal moves you can make. That’s a huge number!īut how did Mr.Claude came up with the number 10 120? Well, the first thing Shannon did was to look at some games of chess. That actually beats the number of atoms in the known universe which is estimated to be 10 78 to 10 82 atoms. In that paper he came up with an estimate that the number of games of chess would be 10 120 .

#Chess move calculator how to#

In 1950, an American Mathematician by the name Claude Shannon wrote a magazine “ How To Programme A Computer For Playing Chess“. How Many Chess Games Are Possible – Shannon’s Number Explained With that said let’s jump right in and find what is this Shannon’s number. I will try to keep it as much simple as possible for you as I know most people aren’t a big fan of huge numbers. This number of games is known as Shannon’s number, and later in this article you will see how it was worked out. It is the move Qf8! I came to this conclusion by a sheer accident when I was preparing one of my recent articles.Have you ever wondered how many games of chess can be possibly played on a chessboard? Well, according to major sources, there is a popular fact that the number of games of chess is greater than the number of atoms there are in the observable universe.

I realize that it is probably impossible to answer such a question unless you feed a supercomputer with millions of games and let it analyze these games. I am trying to find the worst possible move in chess in general, not just the first move of the game. The topic of today's discussion is different. Nevertheless, even here we can argue that 1.h4 or 1.Nh3 are probably as bad. According to GM Edmar Mednis it is 1.f3 (called Barnes Opening). It is probably easier to call the worst first move. d4 scored 61.2 percent for White, compared to 52.9 percent for 1.e4. According to Fischer, 1.e4 is 'best by test.'įrom the other side, when the famous theoretician GM Ernst Gruenfeld was asked why he always started the game with his queen pawn, he answered that he would never make a mistake on the very first move! Statistics from the Computer Chess Championship seem to agree with Gruenfeld through the tournament's first half, 1. Chess openings have been analyzed for centuries and yet even today it is still not easy to identify the best and worst first moves.