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Chess

It’s a knockout

24 February 2024

9:00 AM

24 February 2024

9:00 AM

‘Chess is a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe.’ I’m fond of that adage, which speaks to the depth of the game in a way that numbers cannot. But how many possible games of chess are there? The mathematician Claude Shannon wrote a paper in 1949: ‘Progamming a Computer for Playing Chess’, in which he estimated that there are at least 10120 (i.e.

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