Ska???

[gingerjedi]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6907018.stm

Has he finaly finished it?

[gingerjedi]

On second thoughts he must be working on this one:

Researchers are now hoping to move on to even bigger problems. However, it seems that grand master of the board games - chess - may remain unsolved for some time.

It has somewhere in the range of a billion billion billion billion billion possible positions, meaning that computers, with their current capacity, would takes aeons to solve it.

[Old Greg]

On second thoughts he must be working on this one:

Researchers are now hoping to move on to even bigger problems. However, it seems that grand master of the board games - chess - may remain unsolved for some time.

It has somewhere in the range of a billion billion billion billion billion possible positions, meaning that computers, with their current capacity, would takes aeons to solve it.

I've heard it said of a game of chess of average length, that there are more permutations than atoms in the universe.

[MrRobin]

would takes aeons [/I]

Reminds me of a great definition of eternity I once read:

'Imagine a steel sphere as large as the Earth itself, and once every 1,000 years a fly lands on its surface and takes off again. When the sphere has completely worn away from the friction of this action, eternity will not have even begun.'

[gingerjedi]

I've heard it said of a game of chess of average length, that there are more permutations than atoms in the universe.

I've heard that before and googled to find these approximate figures:

Number of atoms in the universe 10 to the power of 79

Number of possible chess moves 10 to the power of 126

So quite a few more then.

[Buffoon]

At such times a when people quote number like that, I am always reminded of this: YouTube