Chess is - the Universe

I have no idea how these numbers were arrived at (and even if I did, I would probably not be able to wrap my mind around them), but this little mini-article perfectly expresses our belief at Goddesschess that chess is, quite simply, a reflection of the universe! August 5, 2007 Columbus, Ohio You'd Never Have Guessed Some things are just too strange to be coincidence. Maybe the universe is more interconnected than we think. Checkmate Want to know why the best human chess players can still beat the best computers? The secret, brought to you in math-speak, is that the primary game-tree search algorithm in chess faces a massive combinatorial problem. More simply, on average, there are 40 moves for each chess turn. And chess games can last up to 70 turns (although most good players will resign well before if they see their position is lost). So the resulting tree describing all chess games is 1073. Estimates for the number of particles in the universe range from 1070 to 1080, which means the two are actually pretty close!