Re: How Many Games of Chess?

I was hoping this thread would die quickly, since it's wildly off-topic. However... the tightest bound on the number of different positions (more interesting to us (former) chess programmers than different games) that I've seen is about 2.3 * 10^49, due to Tim W. Smith in 1991. Previously we were seeing numbers like 10^120. Smith used Huffman-like position codes to demonstrate the bound. I strongly suggest the discussion move off to rec.games.chess, where the question comes up frequently. Jim Gillogly 10 Astron S.R. 1994, 19:30