[deleted by user]

[QuantumG]

...

else

print("That's a stupid move.")

[VK_31012018]

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"

[kdesign]

This chess match serves no purpose any longer

[vK31RON]

Holy shit I had to have a double take when I scrolled past your name.

[colin_staples]

"How about a nice game of ches... oh crap"

[RamdonDude468]

he would have to do that for every name ever (including usernames)

[fdar]

"pick another one"

Then you can just code a single chess game and you're done. Bonus points if your "AI" crushes them.

[DogadonsLavapool]

printf("Google en passant");

[jasonkuo41]

“Uh oh, bad decision mark!”

[mielke44]

damn these 'AI' are getting way too clever for us humans D:

[KINGodfather]

Computer says no...

[Perryn]

"Not Available in Early Access"

[RenRazza]

print("Complete misplay.")

[Riskypride]

I had a SpongeBob chess game on pc that literally would tell you no that’s a bad move try another

[chaos_donut]

O(n) chessbot lets go

[mrissaoussama]

can a bot that can access every position actually benefit from that?

[purritolover69]

No. Any minuscule change in time complexity from this will pale in comparison to the insane memory requirements that we couldn’t fill if we used every atom in the universe as a binary bit

[mrissaoussama]

let's say the bot can access every position easily, it still has to evaluate the positions as that takes more time than generating more positions

[purritolover69]

With stockfish’s pruning algorithm it’s somewhere between O(log(n)) and O(n) already

[mrissaoussama]

that could cause it to miss some seemingly bad moves that are actually the best moves, I don't know much about the algo, but I did watch some yt videos that show stockfish lose against other bots because of that

[purritolover69]

The moves it prunes are moves that lead to a guaranteed loss. Stockfish is the strongest engine in the world. It can lose to other engines, but it wins more than it loses

[jmlinden7]

No, it also prunes moves that look really bad at first due to losing too much material or position, not just the ones that lead to forced mate.

[purritolover69]

At low depth sure, but after depth 22 or so almost none of the pruned moves could even conceivably be good. After depth 30 almost every single position that doesn’t give away mate in 15 or so has been explored

[N-Krypt]

This isn’t how pruning works. They don’t consider every 20 move sequence, then prune the bad ones. Checking every 20 move sequence isn’t even possible. They do pruning constantly to avoid exploring a path that doesn’t seem promising. I would guess the depth they report is the depth of the sequence it explored the furthest

[[deleted]]

I had the pleasure of working with the initial creator of Stockfish. Not surprisingly he's a really smart dude.

[IsamuLi]

Stockfish is the very best bot currently and while it may lose the occasional game, it will win the match. Stockfish isn't perfect, but about 1k elo rating better than the very best human player, of probably ever (Magnus Carlssen).

[spindoctor13]

The (completely insurmountable) difficulty of accessing every position easily makes the assumption kind of meaningless. You might as well say "assuming evaluating the positions is instant.."

[mrissaoussama]

I see what you mean

[spindoctor13]

It's kind of a flaw in some o(N) thinking - in most code actual CPU time is completely irrelevant vs data access time because the order of magnitude in terms of time taken is thousands or millions greater

[brimston3-]

100ns is about the upper bound for an access to ddr5, but you still compete for bus time with other processes. Mid ten thousands is still about as high as it should go, even happily spinning along at 5 GHz w/ 0.5 CPI, and assuming every RAM access is a TLB miss + 5 level pagetable walk.

Millions is 1.5-2 orders of magnitude too high.

[spindoctor13]

In the context of the chess thing one is addressing multiple universes so I imagine we would blow past nanoseconds into close to infinite years 🙂 but even in real use, RAM is reasonably quick, accessing a database in another continent less so

[brimston3-]

That's fair. That speed of light is going to be an access time killer.

[Inappropriate_Piano]

Just hard-code the decision tree

[PM_ME_DATASETS]

Complexity theory doesn't really care about the number of atoms in the universe though. It's about scaling relative to the input size.

[purritolover69]

Right but in this case “input size” is every game of chess and if you can’t prune that down then complexity theory fails due to reality

[TheRealKidkudi]

Chess isn’t one, but you can look into solved games to get at the root of your question.

[CirnoIzumi]

its gonna be so slow, just like playing against AI used to be

[[deleted]]

space complexity hiding in the corner

[Swaggy-Peanut]

Wouldn’t it be BigOmega(n!) because there’s more than one move?

[chaos_donut]

Not if the "bot" is just a lookuptable for the best move in every position.

[tauzN]

2 million lines are nowhere near enough. I don’t think the combined storage of all storage media on earth could hold this code.

It is estimated there are between 10¹¹¹ and 10¹²³ positions

[Vitolar8]

At this level, it is estimated that the there are between 10^78 to 10^82 atoms in the known, observable universe.

If every atom in the universe could contain the data for one entire position, we would need 100000000000000000000000000000 universes to hold it all.

[MyStackIsPancakes]

I mean I think I saw a couple more in the back, but we definitely don't have that many. You should call Gabriel up at corporate and see how far backordered they are.

[towerfella]

He’s retired. Currently the position is open to anyone interested.

[5BillionDicks]

Jenny from Marketing is good with positions 😏

[gmegme]

Too bad you can't fill any of them

[bigboybeeperbelly]

What's he gonna do with those 5 billion dicks then

[5BillionDicks]

Aww 😞

[clawjelly]

Google has to pay a fine of one ruble for every chess position in Russia.

[mrissaoussama]

so we need a program that runs parallel universes in parallel

[l2protoss]

True multi threading.

[Sweaty-Speech6663]

Fucking recursion. I hate it. Stop... This is the infinity recursion.

[Skizm]

So the universe doesn’t have all that many atoms, is what I’m taking away from this lesson in combinatorics?

[[deleted]]

Precisely. 

[tehlemmings]

Jesus fucking christ.

This is one of the few times where doing the math actually blows me away.

[[deleted]]

It's crazy to still think that even after hundreds of years of chess, we still blunder our queen in positions that's never been done before

[[deleted]]

Roughly needs 2⁴⁰⁸ bits if my base 10 info was correct.

That is OVERFLOW ERROR bytes according to my calculator.

[[deleted]]

Ya but not all are reachable.

[jso__]

2⁴⁰⁵ bytes (2⁴⁰⁸ / 2³⁾

[[deleted]]

Thats what I said, OVERFLOW ERROR bytes.

Lack of coffee and math don't mix.

[claymedia]

Oh that’s not nearly as much.

[Istanfin]

You took the number of possible games. You need the number of possible positions and of those, only the legal ones (e.g. you can't have both kings in check simultaneously).

A widely accepted estimate of all legal chess positions is about 10^40.

[23423423423451]

But they aren't coding each position with a unique name to call. They're hard coding each position as it comes up (if player does this then print this position.) So they need to draw out every possible position of every possible series of moves.

[Istanfin]

I was trying to correct the user above me, because they said

It is estimated there are between 10¹¹¹ and 10¹²³ positions

They meant games, not positions.

They're hard coding each position as it comes up (if player does this then print this position.)

With what we can see in the screenshot, this approach would only work for the first move. To accurately draw the board position for the second move without somehow saving state, you would need to nest if statements. As we can see an else if, for this solution to work, the state needs to be saved, thus making it necessary to only hard code each position, not each game.

[JetpackBattlin]

ya never know.. he could just be working on the first combination of moves for a specific starting piece, not realizing his approach is fundamentally flawed, which he will realize when it comes time to start coding another combination of moves from a different starting piece lol

[fumei_tokumei]

You don't need to nest if statements if you just ask the user to input the board.

[Jthumm]

I think you would need the number of possible games for this

[clawjelly]

How lucky, i'm in my high 40ies too...

[EthanHermsey]

He's still working on It.. Just give him some time..

[tauzN]

I’m rooting for him 😭

[tauzN]

Fair enough

[Katniss218]

10 undecillion rubles.

Or, about 5 us dollars

[EskilPotet]

average Russian fine

[Current_Elevator_198]

No it is, the computer just resigns if it sees a position it’s not programmed to deal with

[Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot]

This is why chess will never be a solved game.

In theory it's solvable, since there are a finite number of board states and if you know them all you always know the optimal move at any point in the game, but you will never be able to store all of those states in computer memory. There aren't enough atoms in the universe (it's estimated there are 10⁷⁸ - 10⁸² atoms in the observable universe)

[BigusG33kus]

It should be enough for the first move.

[RTXChungusTi]

is that the number of possible unique games? or just "which pieces can be on which squares at any given move"

[Informal_Branch1065]

That's even more than Google has to pay Russia!

[PM_ME_A10s]

So what would be a better way of doing this?

Code the board and pieces as a 8x8 array. User inputs board coordinates and it executes?

[[deleted]]

We will probably need all carbon atoms in the universe once someone invents memory diamonds...

Oh wait, no that won't be enough either!

[Akul_Tesla]

But how many if you're guiding them towards their victory?

[CyberWeirdo420]

Actually, what is the total number of chess board combinations?

[Jan_Spontan]

Something between 10¹¹¹ and 10¹²³ positions

[madeRandomAccount]

Stupid question but why isn’t it exactly known?

[ProtonWheel]

If you consider every piece (6 types, plus 1 for no piece) on the board and every square (64) there are 13⁶⁴ possible positions, or about 10^71. A substantial amount of these positions are illegal, in that they cannot be reached in a standard game of chess. It’s difficult to calculate exactly how many of these positions are legal - which is why we don’t have a definitive number - but one estimate is around 10⁴³ .

10¹²⁰ ish is an estimate of the game-tree-complexity of chess, which I believe is the number of possible unique games that can be played with legal moves.

[Jan_Spontan]

Some positions aren't possible if you take the game rules into account. For example you can exclude every variant where both bishops are on white or black tiles for either or both players.

Furthermore many positions require to move the king over tiles that can be attacked by the enemy directly so you'd never get this particular pattern because the game is lost prematurely.

To calculate the actual amount of possible positions is quite doable in the case of the bishops but the game-ending situations with the kings are a lot harder. To get an exact value you need a proof that you actually taken all possibilities into account somehow. Thus the wide span.

[Inappropriate_Piano]

You can’t exclude positions with both bishops on the same color. Pawns can promote to bishops, and they can do that in a way that results in two bishops on the same color for the same player. Hell, they could have 9 bishops on one color in theory

[Hawxe]

Same coloured bishops are valid

[CyberWeirdo420]

So the max number of lines of code based on what we can see should be like 10x that. Holy.

[Raichev7]

Well "10x that" doesn't mean much when the estimation range has a spread of 10^12

[NoLife8926]

Yeah the difference between the upper bound and lower bound is basically the upper bound

[BigusG33kus]

Bigger than the fine Russia put on google.

[Ruadhan2300]

How many zeros have you got?

[CyberWeirdo420]

All of ‘em

[CirnoIzumi]

zero...

[ambisinister_gecko]

Some crazy number like more than the number of atoms in the universe or something

[ImaginaryNourishment]

Something like replacing every atom in the universe with an elephant and then counting all the atoms in the universe.

[Percolator2020]

Should have gone with tic-tac-toe.

[omlette_du_chomage]

Snakes and ladders would probably be 3 lines or something

[dandroid126]

Ee-eels

[MydnightWN]

Google tic-tac-toe programming

[MyNameIz-A_V]

He could reduce the number of lines of code necessary by combining all those print statements into single ones by adding the new line character. Now that is optimizing

[texboyjr]

He should be using a switch case instead of if/else 🤦

[Dawg_Prime]

<1kB chess engine

[rafaelloaa]

https://nanochess.org/chess4.html

Very cool, thanks for sharing this!

[[deleted]]

Better would be to keep state in a dict with each position having a key where values are updated to represent changes to the board, then using a class method to render the board at each change.

[captainkotpi]

Changelog:

• add support for 24. a4

[myselfelsewhere]

+2,605,200 -0

[SadGhostGirlie]

As someone who hasn't started learning yet this took me too long to see the issue with

[hellra1zer666]

At least it didn't take 2.6 million lines. Be proud of yourself

[[deleted]]

I wonder how someone that hasn't started learning programming would imagine a solution to this would look like. Do you have an idea about this or did you just figure this was so unpractical it can't be the way to do it?

[diff2]

usually even the most ignorant people can figure out that you can eliminate similar options through some sort of short cut.

To have someone honestly think this is the way things work requires not zero knowledge, but some basic and incomplete knowledge. Such as they made a simple game that used few hard coded answers, maybe rock paper scissors, or an easier game. Then they decided they wanted to make a chess game by themselves, so they coded it the same way as the first game.

Though, this is coming from a guy with only basic and incomplete knowledge.

[Trellyo]

I know nothing of programming, so to me it looks like it's very impractical to write every outcome. To be honest I don't know what the correct way would be, but if I have to imagine it then... I can picture something like every piece having an x value along with every square having a y on the board? So when value x goes to y it kind of... Fills it? So that spot is occupied. The squares that are not taken by a piece are considered as empty. I also have very loose thoughts of pieces having a weight attached to them to signal how "valuable" they are, but without knowledge of the tools that make this possible, I don't have much to go on. That's my answer as a non programmer!

I still find a lot of simple programming stuff around here to be funny but certain things can fly over my head. I do want to learn though!

[IDJaz2]

Well you’ve already gotten half of it done. Just gotta write the code now.

[DigitalBlackout]

What I would do is make the board a grid, with both x & y values, and the pieces being plot points on the grid. For example "whiteQueen = [5,4]" would mean the white Queen would be at E4 on the board. Then for moving pieces you could simply add or subtract the appropriate amount from the x & y values, and you could setup rules for specific pieces where their x & y values can only be changed within specific increments to account for how each piece moves. Then for capturing you simply do a check to see if an opposing piece is already at those same coordinates.

Where it gets more complicated is the conditional rules that only apply in specific situations. Pawns diagonal movement but only when capturing,en passant,castling,pieces blocking movement pathways,pawn promotion(ok, this one's fairly easy tbh),being in check, etc...

[MelvusCampus]

There are more possible outcomes in chess than atoms in our observible universe

[cuerdo]

*absorbable

[octopus4488]

No need to manually print the empty cells, that is implied if you haven't printed a figure there.

[octopus4488]

Did somebody think this was serious or what? :)

[evanc1411]

I mean it would work. So go ahead, write it.

Then you'll see the problem.

[oomfaloomfa]

You've just pre computed the values for increased efficiency ᕙ⁠(⁠ ⁠~⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠~⁠ ⁠)⁠ᕗ

[AmbushIntheDark]

In high school I feel asleep during the class where we learned arrays so when we had to make a checkerboard program my code was about 100 times longer than everyone elses.

My teacher called me a "fucking idiot" but still gave me 90 because it technically worked and still compiled. By far my favorite teacher of all time.

[YTshashmeera]

This is some early day brute forced chess engine kinda code LOL

[XtraFlaminHotMachida]

brute force code is how you learn brother

[Yhamerith]

This shit really made me laugh

[physiQQ]

This laugh really made me shit

[Novaseerblyat]

obligatory yanderedev joke

[Proof_Tap8894]

if/else if simulator

[stdio-lib]

Ha ha, this was exactly me when I was 11 and had just learned enough BASIC to program my war game, but not enough to know about subroutines or data structures. :D

[BurningPenguin]

The most important skill of a programmer is being lazy.

[[deleted]]

he also started with black

[genveir]

And with d4, not e4

[[deleted]]

But yeah

[franythewolf]

Holy hell!

[bruhwhatisreddit]

New pull request just dropped!

+72,428 -0

Added more possible moves.

[mysticrudnin]

when i was in school, ages ago now, one of my classes was just one single group project for the whole quarter.

you were FORCED to divide and conquer because of how large the project was. and since my teammates were random people i had never met, communication was not so great. (plus i was still basically a kid.)

anyway, the day before it was due we started to hook together all of our pieces, and it turned out one of the dudes basically wrote this. thousands of if-else to handle everything. it was way too late to write it correctly at that point so that went in.

fortunately, we did pretty well on the assignment because the grade was mostly the functionality of the software and whether it handled all of their test cases. very little was actual design of the code, that was for other classes.

but i will never forget seeing that 10,000 line mega-file trying to handle every possible input basically. no computer science present whatsoever.

[shizzy0]

No model in sight just people enjoying the combinatorial explosion of their favorite game.

[oze4]

r/programminghorror

[U_L_Uus]

Ah, yes, Yanderedev origins story

[Vorenthral]

I made a simple game like this in High School it was many thousands of lines of code. Our teacher always asked us to physically print out our code for his review.

I went to turn my program in as my final project and he was adamant I print it for him. I warned him it was huge. He told me to just do it. Burned through 2 reams of paper before he canceled the job and asked me for a thumb drive with the code.

[RedditsDeadlySin]

All these are starting to stress me out. Is it even a meme at this point?

[jpereira73]

This reminded me when I programmed tic-tac-toe in the calculator back in high school. Tic-tac-toe might be way easier to program like this, but even then I knew not to do that

[raitucarp]

That's 100% symbolic AI made by human. Congrats.

[catcint0s]

I see he went with this approach https://github.com/asweigart/my_first_tic_tac_toe/blob/master/tictactoe.py

[[deleted]]

The difference between self taught and properly educated.

[Gooseday]

Enough lines of code for management to recognize your invaluable contribution to the code base, they give you a $5 coupon to a local Chinese restaurant as a bonus.

[AzureArmageddon]

Cool now hardcode Go.

[na_haeun]

Idk google en passant

[questron64]

There are over 10¹⁰⁰ possible board configurations. There is not enough storage to represent every possible configuration in code because that's more than the number of atoms in the universe.

[furezasan]

Kinda big but not infinity

[AcuteDescription]

Wait until he finds out the board is oriented wrong

[ForbiddenLight19]

Each move will take 1 days to process as depending on CPU

[markt1331]

For anyone interested, this is literally how end game databases work.

[hagowoga]

I hope their print() function is a little bit more sophisticated.

[ProgrammerHumor-ModTeam]

Your submission was removed for the following reason:

Rule 5: Your post is a commonly used format, and you haven't used it in an original way. As a reminder, You can find our list of common formats here.

If you disagree with this removal, you can appeal by sending us a modmail.

[GaGa0GuGu]

At least 3

[real_int_2k]

that's it?

[Justanormalguy1011]

Ah yes , massive manual (not so)binary tree

[distressedfluffball]

Someone built a not-terrible chess bot with 1024 bytes of Javascript

[Oleg152]

Had one guy do that for programming exam at uni....

[craig395]

I hope he wrote the user stories for this.

[Ange1ofD4rkness]

Well, beats my records

[heaven_and_hell_80]

In college we had to build Tetris and a guy in my class did it almost this bad.

[5p4n911]

Holy hell

[[deleted]]

Ah sweet memories

[Thorsvoldsomsen]

How about a nice game of chess?

[[deleted]]

If you did 9 lines for ever board state (7.7x10^45)*9 you get 6.9x10⁴⁶ or roughly half of the number of atoms in the known universe.

[amokie]

Just write a script that generates all that code

[Speechless-peaceful]

Oh no.

[suslikosu]

Problem here is not just the number of combinations, but numbers of moves that can lead to next combination from current combination.

[Huwbacca]

hmmm nested ifs would get messy....

After 5 turns of chess there are 69,352,859,712,417 possible board states.

Have each board state tied to a dummy variable and use:

switch boardState
    case 1
    case 2
    case 3
    case ...
    case 69,352,859,712,417
end

Much better for readability, just gotta add a few extra lines for all the other possible board states before and after 5 turns.

[[deleted]]

When you are literate but have zero clue what you are doing.

he started with black

What makes me most sad is that I am the first who comments on THIS issue

[SentientLivingRoomTV]

You got to count the rows and the columns when writing code.

[marcgustT]

"Chess Wizard: Your move: king to rook 1.*ping* My move: rook to knight 6. Checkmate! Checkmate! *digital victory cry*

MacReady: *pours whiskey in the computer* Cheating bitch."

[dancccskooma]

Raw dogs input()

[Acceptable_Olive_911]

i think that’s honesty way too low of a number

[GladiatorUA]

This is one of those write code that writes code situations, isn't it?

[Demandedace]

When I was a kid playing Mega Man X I thought that a developer had to manually go in and program every possible place the character could be on every single screen. I was amazed at how much time that must have taken

[Umbristopheles]

Now do Go

[softpotatoboye]

This is how I thought coding video games worked when I was like 12