Go boards move > atoms.?

Exponential complexity is just kind of amazing like that.

It is estimated that there are between 10^78 and 10^82 atoms in the observable universe (How Many Atoms Are There in the Universe? | Universe Today).

10^78 simply means a 1 followed 78 zeros, a number that one can easily write out in a minute or two on a piece of paper. Likewise, 10^82 just adds four more zeroes (while being 10000 times larger! Imagine 10 kilometers compared to a single meter, or 10 meters compared to a millimeter).

The number of legal positions on a Go board has been carefully worked out to be a number with 171 digits (see Counting Legal Positions in Go and Go and mathematics - Wikipedia). Although this number is only a little over twice as long as a 82 digit number, it is unfathomably larger. If every one of the 10^82 atoms in the universe was replaced with its own universe of 10^82 atoms, we still only have about 10^164 atoms, which is still 100000 times smaller than the number of legal Go positions.

As for the number of a games, Walraet and Tromp (see https://matthieuw.github.io/go-games-number/AGoogolplexOfGoGames.pdf) have shown that there are at least a googolplex (10^10^100) legal games of Go.

10^100 (1 followed by one hundred zeros) is a “googol”.

10^10^100 is a googolplex and means 1 followed by a googol zeros, which is an absurdly large number. Given that there are only 10^82 atoms in the universe, it is impossible to even imagine all of these 10^100 zeros being written down, unless one somehow managed to pack 10^18 zeros (one billion billions) onto each and every atom!

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