Chess & Bravado Statements
A famous chess player once publicly said that he could see 20 moves ahead during his chess game. This statement implies a chess player also seeing the 20 move responses of his opponent. Forgive me for saying but a calculation that small is unreachable for any known thoughtful being here on planet earth were we live.
So why is it so unlikely?
Average choices per move: In a typical position, each side has around 31–35 legal moves.
Game tree explosion: If we (roughly) say 30 options per move, then a 20‑ply sequence (10 moves for each side) has about:
30 (to the power of 20) = 3.5 × 10 (to the power of 29)….
possible paths. That’s an absurd number of possibilities.
Final answer in a decimalised digit equation
0.000000000000000000000000000002857
That’s:
2.8 octillionths of a percent
Functionally zero in any real chess players cosmic game mind
This number isn’t only small — it’s cosmically small. It’s smaller than:
The odds of randomly guessing a 10‑card poker hand
The odds of picking a specific atom out of a litre of air
The odds of winning the lottery ten times in a row
Not possible. So perhaps a brazen statement from a once world championship chess player. It’s more than probable that the number one chess seat on the planet sometimes gets some to thinking that a way, unrealistically.
