Number of Possible Chess Configurations

...just say infinity, its a lot easier than all these calculations

 Okay, I'm sure this has been done before, because it's so simple, but I can't resist:

There are four ways to place the white king in a corner, and for each of those there are 60 ways to place the black king (4 * 60)

There are 24 ways to place the white king on an edge and not on a corner, and for each of those there are 58 ways to place the black king (24 * 58)

There are 36 ways to place the white king not on an edge, and for each of those there are 55 ways to place the black king (36 * 55)

4 * 60 + 24 * 58 + 36 * 55 = 240 + 1392 + 1980 = 3,612

ichabod801,

but what happens when you add more pieces to the board ???

can you calculate those in your head ? and keep track of them all without missing any and without duplicating any?

hahaha.

If I could keep things in my head, I'd be playing chess OTB instead of here.

Of course, you could take the two kings calculation and use it to make a two kings and a pawn calculation. You could keep adding pieces and make a new calculation every day. Assuming you could make those calculations, it would take you over two years to calculate all the possibile positions, without accounting for pawn promotion.

On the pawn promotion issue, the pawn, although has changed into another piece, is still a unique piece from the others.

One must eliminate the possibility of any pawn changing into a King and must account for all combinations of all the other pieces as a promotion and their space occupying moves.

So, once we calculate the permutations without a promoted pawn, we must go back and add another layer of permutations accounting for pawn promotions and its' permutations.

Another discussion - http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/how-many-different-chess-positions-are-there - reached many of the same conclusions as this one; which led me to pose this question: which will be solved first: chess or chess.com?

There are 2^2600 posible chess games....

Artfizz, if there are as many as 50,000 chess players here, and up to nearly 500,000 members who signed in,

then the variable ranges from 50,000 to 500,000 (as of today.)  we will call that variable     X

Sleeper postulated that there could be   2^2600 possible chess games, that would mean that there could be as many as   500,000 ( 2^2600) possible ideas to solve on chess.com

Since that is too large a number for most minds to remember, relearning occurs and "history repeats itself" and it is possible that chess.com will never be solved.

while chess, with a finite number of moves possible, theoretically could be solved, the sheer enormity of some of the numbers involved, precludes humans from realizing the 'solution' of chess.

My head hurts, I need to go fishing.

Retguvvie, my numbers came from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game-tree_complexity.

Note that I might have needed to be more specific in saying that the game is 80 half-moves long, on average and this doesn't appear to be too far of a stretch from the actual truth.

Also if one wants to dig into the math a bit deeper on that page, basically draughts, Chess, and Go are ridiculously more complex than the others listed because their game-tree complexity requires a deterministic(exponential) turing machine to solve versus a polynomial one for more trivial games.

well, buddy, 80 half moves in chess is only 40 moves, not 80 moves as you stated initially.

The number of possible moves, recorded in short algebraic, is tiny. 

64 non-capture pawn moves; 64 non-capture each for rook, knight, bishop, queen and rook. Throw in capures, checks, diambiguations, en passant. About a few thousand; tops.

... but well worth counting - and non-trivial. Easy for someone to say: "about a few thousand; tops"; a lot harder to calculate precisely.

I wonder what the longest single move notation would be? 6 characters?

Artfizz, would that be descriptive or algebraic ?  - or forsyth or some other notation format  (not in english?)  ?

    when you post a 'problem condition' for us to solve, you might want to establish "limiting parameters" or you may receive answers from all over the place.

 The answers seem to be 'all over the place' without any help from me! There will be distinct solutions for ALL of the different notations (including CLIPCLOP). Short algebraic is probably the least complex to solve first.

Any advance on 6 characters?

Nf3xd4++

Knights at f3, f5, and b3 (one promoted from pawn), bishop at g2. Enemy king at c6, enemy whatever at d4. Double disambiguated knight takes d4 with double check. Eight characters. Seven if you disallow ++ for double check.

what would constitute a "double disambiguated knight" ???  I don't think I have seen that term before.

or are you just making stuff up - tripping in fantasy land ?

 Any of the three knights in my example could capture d4, so you have to disambiguate which one does it. If the f3 knight is the one that captures, you can't use the f to disambiguate, because there are two f-file knights. Same for 3: there are two knights on the third rank. So you have to double disambiguate with f and 3: Nf3. And I quit tripping back in 1990.

More useless numbers I've calculated: there are 236,196 ways to choose a set of Chess men from a standard set, if that set must include at least the two kings.

Don't know if it's already been referenced, but this is discussed at length here:

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/how-many-different-chess-positions-are-there?page=4

but you persist in posting useless numbers in a useless forum....   are you sure you stopped tripping??

Think about it. The 236,196 number I derived using generating functions. But those are too tedious to solve by hand, so I wrote a Python program to do it for me. So I wrote a computer program to solve a math problem about Chess. A geek trifecta. I'm not tripping, I'm just a geek.

BTW, I'm working on the total number of possible moves in algebraic notation. I'm up to 17,306, but that does not include disambiguated moves that are checks. And I just thought of an error in that which makes it an over count.