How many chess games are possible ?

So i tried to calculate the possible (and legal of course) chess games that could be played until my head farted.Please send help...

It is called math.

The average life expectancy  is of 78 years.

A year has 365 days.

A day has 1440 minutes.

A year has 525600 minutes.

The average life lasts 40996800 minutes.

If you are not a troll and actually have a life, you would have at best 8 hours to play chess per day. (24 hours - 8hrs of sleep - 8 hrs of job = 8)

That means you would have 480 minutes to play chess per day.

So you have 175200 minutes to play chess per year.

And 13665600 minutes to play chess in all of your life.

If you play 3 min blitz games (they last 6 min)you would be able to play 2277600.

To be able to know how much games you would be able to play in different time controls just create a simple program on Java that gets your life expectancy, the time control and makes the math with those numbers.

Nobody knows, but it's at least 10^120.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number 

Here is one of many previous threads on this topic:

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/how-many-distinct-chess-games-are-possible-and-which-is-the-longest 

Lol I got the question wrong, I thought he meant until he died.

Oops.

That's huge

The longest a game can last  (theoritically, if you do the math) is 5949 moves.

The longest  game ever recorded was was Nikolić–Arsović, Belgrade 1989.

"Hundreds. Literally, hundreds. "

Did you know there are hundreds of possible tic tac toe games?

To me, it was crazy to think that such a simple game actually had such a huge tree.

It becomes believable when you see that some positions are actually fairly non trivial though. Take this position:

O - X

- - -

- X -

X has blundered with 2: (square 8). O to move and draw. There is only one drawing move, all other moves lose. It is easy for a human to come to the solution quite quickly by elimination or luck, but I find it actually amazing that there are tic tac toe positions that need to be "solved" at all and aren't just immediately trivial.

This position stuck in my mind because the first time I saw it I actually misevaluated it as a forced win for x, not seeing o's defensive resource. I was amazed that I could actually misevaluate a tic tac toe position. But there are probably at least a thousand possible games.

ya i was gonna mention the numberphile video too. they said it was around 10^40. shannon was around in the 1800s, he didn't make a very good estimate.

17.

Man, those people in the 1800s, they really sucked at math. Inventing trivial things like fourier transoformations, the Reimann hypothesis, and of course they were too stupid to solve Fermat's last theorem from the century before- they were just 19th century people.

Not to mention other useless and completely trivial inventions like quaternions, group theory, matrix algebra, and higher dimensional geometry. Of course they didn't even have computers, so all of this must have been very easy in trivial, every college student is familiar with all of this.