There’s a mathematician that figured that there’s 10^120 possible chess games, as a lower bound. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number#:~:text=Shannon showed a calculation for,a Computer for Playing Chess".
That’s a 1 followed by 120 zeros for just the number of possible games. With this method they’d have to manually go through every move for every one of those games. If we say a game lasts 30 turns on average and they’d take 1 second to code each turn (realistically it’d be longer) it’d take 6.9*10^109 (69 followed by 108 zeros) times as long as the age of the universe.
It’s definitely satire. 2 million lines of code is an absurd under-exageration. This post had me looking up the number of possible chess games, because if you coded chess like above you would have to have an if statement for every outcome, and it’s 10^120 different possible games.
That’s the number of possible games, the number of possible board states is much lower, 10^40.
Although you’re still clearly correct in the end anyways because it’s still an absurd number of board states and it’s not even formatted to be one state per line.
By an extremely significant margin. Here’s another fun one: getting a unique shuffle in a deck of cards is 1/52!. So if you wanted to count all of the different possible arrangements of cards, counting one per second, you can:
Start walking around the equator at a leisurely pace of one step per billion years.
Once you’ve made it around the earth, remove a single drop of water from the Pacific Ocean and walk around the earth again.
Once the Pacific Ocean is empty, re-fill it and lay a sheet of paper on the ground. Keep stacking a new sheet every time you’ve re-emptied the ocean drop by drop every time you circle the earth at one step every billion years.
When the stack of paper reaches the sun, you’re about a third of the way there!
The way I like to put it is that every single time you randomly shuffle a deck of cards, you are guaranteed to get an order that has never been seen before, by anyone in history. That will be the case for every person who ever shuffles a deck of cards for the rest of time.
The post is satire, but I remember being ~8-9 and trying to create a “game” in Microsoft Word with hyperlinks between documents and nothing else. I had hundreds of documents (each representing a game state) before I got tired of that project.
This game was developed by someone who didn’t know anything about programming outside of IF statements, integers, and strings. Here is an excerpt of the massively long source code
I really hope this is satire. Otherwise I’m scared to ask how long it took.
There’s a mathematician that figured that there’s 10^120 possible chess games, as a lower bound. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number#:~:text=Shannon showed a calculation for,a Computer for Playing Chess". That’s a 1 followed by 120 zeros for just the number of possible games. With this method they’d have to manually go through every move for every one of those games. If we say a game lasts 30 turns on average and they’d take 1 second to code each turn (realistically it’d be longer) it’d take 6.9*10^109 (69 followed by 108 zeros) times as long as the age of the universe.
So it’s doable? That’s all I needed to hear.
for just the MINIMUM number of possible games. (lower bound)
It’s definitely satire. 2 million lines of code is an absurd under-exageration. This post had me looking up the number of possible chess games, because if you coded chess like above you would have to have an if statement for every outcome, and it’s 10^120 different possible games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number
The way I understood it, it’s two million lines and nowhere near finished.
Anyway, satire.
That’s the number of possible games, the number of possible board states is much lower, 10^40.
Although you’re still clearly correct in the end anyways because it’s still an absurd number of board states and it’s not even formatted to be one state per line.
You only have to code a fraction of those as the computer should take the same move for several of the user inputs.
I read that there are less atoms in the universe than possible chess games, which is quite insane
By an extremely significant margin. Here’s another fun one: getting a unique shuffle in a deck of cards is 1/52!. So if you wanted to count all of the different possible arrangements of cards, counting one per second, you can:
Start walking around the equator at a leisurely pace of one step per billion years.
Once you’ve made it around the earth, remove a single drop of water from the Pacific Ocean and walk around the earth again.
Once the Pacific Ocean is empty, re-fill it and lay a sheet of paper on the ground. Keep stacking a new sheet every time you’ve re-emptied the ocean drop by drop every time you circle the earth at one step every billion years.
When the stack of paper reaches the sun, you’re about a third of the way there!
The way I like to put it is that every single time you randomly shuffle a deck of cards, you are guaranteed to get an order that has never been seen before, by anyone in history. That will be the case for every person who ever shuffles a deck of cards for the rest of time.
this is definitely satire, otherwise it would take longer than the age of the universe to finish coding it lol
Literally impossible to code every bosrd state, so forever
The post is satire, but I remember being ~8-9 and trying to create a “game” in Microsoft Word with hyperlinks between documents and nothing else. I had hundreds of documents (each representing a game state) before I got tired of that project.
Today I will remind everyone of DRAGON: A Game About a Dragon
This game was developed by someone who didn’t know anything about programming outside of IF statements, integers, and strings. Here is an excerpt of the massively long source code
My eyes! The
globalvariable list is huge!Edit: nm, I looked again and they’re in a class. Still insane either way.
For a second there I thought the 100% science-based dragons game had been made.
I’ve seen people try to write programs like this.