Computer v Chess-Player

Abstract

Chess is not only one of the most engaging but also one of the most sophisticated of human activities. The game is so old that we cannot say when or where it was invented; millions of games have been played and thousands of books have been written about it; yet the play is still fresh and forever new. Simple arithmetic tells why. On the average, each move in chess offers a choice of about 30 possibilities, and the average length of a full game is about 40 moves. By this reckoning there are at least 10120 possible games. To get some idea of what that number means, let us suppose that we had a superfast computing machine which could play a million games a second (a ridiculous supposition). It would take the machine about 10¹⁰⁸ years to play all the possible games!