Checkmate

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​I love playing chess. I’m not very good at it, but the game never bores me. I think I found a clue as to why. There are many more possible chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe. That’s a lot of games. Mathematicians have a value for the number of possible games (of course we do). It’s called the Shannon Number—somewhere between 10 to the 111th and 10 to the 123rd (which is a notably humongous range.) There are 10 to the 81st atoms in the observable universe—but then again, if you took away all the space between the atoms, they would fit inside an apple…so there’s that.

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