// orbit · chess

64 squares, infinite stories

Chess is a war with no blood, a puzzle that fights back, and an art form where the canvas never changes. Thirty-two pieces, sixty-four squares, and more possible games than there are atoms in the universe.

// how big is chess

The Shannon number

10120
rough number of possible chess games (Claude Shannon's 1950 estimate)
1080
rough number of atoms in the observable universe
400
possible positions after just one move each

After both players move once, there are 400 possible positions. After two moves each, about 72,000. After three, over 9 million. By the time you're a few moves into the middlegame, you are very likely playing a game that has never existed before in human history.

// chess as art

The Immortal Game

London, 1851. Adolf Anderssen, playing white, gives away a bishop, then both rooks, then his queen, everything an ordinary player would protect. Then, with almost nothing left on the board, he checkmates with three small pieces. This is the final position:

23. Be7#. The bishop checks Black's king on d8, and the two knights cover every escape square. Meanwhile Black still has a queen, two rooks and two bishops sitting uselessly on the board. Material is a number. Checkmate is a story.

// chess as science

How machines think

A chess engine imagines the future as a giant tree: every move it could make, every reply, every reply to that. Then it uses an idea called minimax: assume the opponent always plays their best move, and pick the move whose worst case is best.

The tree is far too big to search fully, so engines use alpha-beta pruning. The moment a line is clearly worse than one already found, it stops exploring it.

  1. 1997IBM's Deep Blue beats world champion Garry Kasparov, searching around 200 million positions a second.
  2. 2017DeepMind's AlphaZero learns chess from nothing but the rules, playing millions of games against itself. Within hours it's beating Stockfish, the top engine of the time, with a style people described as almost human: sacrificing pieces for long-term pressure.
  3. todayEngines are far stronger than any human. And yet people play chess more than ever, because the point was never just to win. It's how you win.

// over the board

Why I play

Chess is the purest thinking game I know. No luck, no hidden cards, just you, your opponent, and whoever sees one move deeper. It trains the same muscles as building things: patience, planning, and knowing when to throw the plan away.

// challenge accepted

Fancy a game?

Play me on chess.combootstrapp_1 · send a challenge, I usually accept open ↗