Questions
Chess by the numbers
How many games and positions chess has, how many first moves there are, how fast a game can end: answered with numbers and their sources.
How many possible chess games are there?From 20 after one move to two sextillion after fifteen, and why whole games are beyond counting.
How many chess positions are there?About 4.8 × 10⁴⁴ in all — and why far fewer positions than games appear early on.
How many first moves are there in chess?Twenty: sixteen pawn moves and four knight moves. All of them, with their names.
What is the Shannon number?Claude Shannon’s 1950 estimate of 10¹²⁰ chess games: where it comes from and how big it is.
What is perft?The move-counting test chess programmers use: 20, 400, 8,902, 197,281…
What is the fastest checkmate in chess?The Fool’s Mate in two moves, all eight versions of it, and the fastest stalemate.
How many chess openings are there?500 ECO codes, 3,865 named lines in the Lichess list, and where the names stop.
What is the most legal moves possible in one chess position?218, in a position Nenad Petrović composed in 1964 — and proven to be the maximum in 2024.
In Turkish: Satrançta kaç farklı oyun oynanabilir? · Satrançta kaç pozisyon var? · Satrançta ilk hamlede kaç seçenek var? · Aptal Matı: satrançta en hızlı mat · Shannon sayısı nedir?