Shannon number
From Wiki @ Karl Jones dot com
The Shannon number, named after Claude Shannon, is a conservative lower bound (not an estimate) of the game-tree complexity of chess of 10120, based on an average of about 103 possibilities of a move for White followed by one for Black and a typical game lasting about 40 such pairs of moves.
History
Shannon calculated it to demonstrate the impracticality of solving chess by brute force, in his 1950 paper "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess".
This influential paper introduced the field of computer chess.
See also
External links
- Shannon number @ Wikipedia
