How Many Games of Chess?

[m5@vail.tivoli.com (Mike McNally)]

Ken B Kirksey writes:
 > how many possible games of chess are there?  

A lot.  I recall a somewhat compulsive friend calculating how long it
would take to generate the complete game tree assuming the surface of
Jupiter were covered with Cyber 7600's (it was a while ago), and it
was a long time.

It's probably tricky to figure the count because you can't just use a
simple combinatorial system; you have to filter out illegal
configurations, and of course the paths down the game tree don't all
terminate in the same number of hops (and you have to find the ones
that don't terminate at all!).

Then again, I'm not a mathematician and I don't play chess, so the
word "tricky" above needs to be re-evaluated subjectively.

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