Removed from main page:
Theoretically, at some point in the future, a computer will be able to play all possible chess games and determine the optimal move for any given board position (using Moore's Law as a guide, it probably won't happen until 2030). For example, the fastest chess programs can 'look ahead' and completely finish the last 15 moves in a game (because of "pre-calculated" endgame tables). This is possible because there is a finite number of ways the chess pieces can be arranged on the chessboard.
- Finite, yes, but very, very large. As noted at the beginning, the number of possible board positions is probably greater than the number of elementary particles in the universe. Moore's misquoted law says computers double in speed every 18 months, but to search one more possible move on a chessboard typically requires a factor of 16 increase. Computers in 2030 (by Moore's Law) are a mere million times faster, which gets you all of 5 more moves. --Belltower
I have seen estimates for the number of particles in the observable universe ranging from 10
80 to 10
88 or so. Have there been recent changes in those estimates? --
AxelBoldt
- No, I was acting on seemingly robust, but in hindsight vague recollection. Thanks for catching this. I'm reverting now.--AV
The table in Chess
/Board is plagued by the same problem as described in
Hebrew alphabet/Talk. The HTML code is crashing some browser. I beleive the indentation of the table code is causing Wikipedia to insert a PRE tag and /PRE tag around the entries. It may or may not be the cause of the crash though.
If you can be more specific, we can diagnose this. Particularly, if it consistently crashes when you use a specific browser, please tell us exactly what that is here; we'll then edit the page, and you can try again with that same browser. But if you just talk in generalities we can't help. --LDC
- According to the descriptions on Hebrew alphabet/Talk, there were two problems. One with extra spacing with Netscape; the other is crashing on MS IE 5 on Macintosh. Apparently, they are browser bugs that triggered by certain type of HTML code style for table. One person fixed the problem on the Hebrew aphabet page by removing all the extract line feeds and tabs outside of the td tags. If you have a debugger, you can try to see how each browser treats text or white space outside the td tags. My observation is that Netscape will collect them and treat those out of place text in front of the table, but IE tries to collect them and crash on the Macintosh while handling them. On both pages, someone was trying to beautify the HTML code by inserting linefeed and indentation inside the table HTML code without knowing that some browser cannot stand too much beauty.
- I cannot speak for the IE problem, but on my Netscape 4.5 on Windows NT, I have to scroll the Chess/Board page 4 times before seeing the table.
Now the center of the boards is white on Netscape. On IE, it looks fine.
- In IE6, which does come with all unicode stuff you can imagine, and which displays thinds like δ correctly, I only get empty rectangles on the unicode chessboard. How can I fix that? --Magnus Manske
It's not the browser, it's your fonts. Even some of the largest Unicode fonts available (such as MS Arial Unicode) do not have _all_ characters, such as the chess pieces. Some fonts might have the chess pieces but not the Chinese characters. The browser does a pretty good job finding a font with the right characters when needed, but you do have to have the fonts installed. --LDC
From the main article: "Minor variations to the rules would either make chess a trivially easy task for a computer to win, or conversely leave even elaborate computers easy pickings for amateur players." Really? What minor variations? Does anyone have a citation for this?
-- The Anome
If fifty moves have been played by each player without a piece being taken or a pawn moved
(in tournament play, some situations are extended to one hundred moves).
I´m quite confident that this was abandond a few years ago. --Vulture
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