Flashes of Panic

In response to an email from a cousin about randomness, I started thinking about how much computational power would be required to model all the possible states of a game of Othello.

It’s entirely possible that my math (and CS theory) is deficient, but I think we managed to conclude that an average game includes something like 3×10³⁰ possible states (greater than the current estimate of stars in the universe by a few orders of magnitude,) and that even applying a supercomputer to a brute-force modeling of all potential games would probably take longer than I expect to live.

I guess I could’ve figured this all out by finding anything published by the IBM team that programmed Deep Blue, which took approximately that approach to chess. The complexity of games is probably not dissimilar, but it’s interesting to try reaching the conclusions on my own. And this is just a simple game that existed before electricity.

Now Playing: Basement Apt. from eePee by Weeping Tile