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From: ttobler@unislc.slc.unisys.com (Trent Tobler)
Subject: Re: Chess - exhaustive searching
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Message-ID: <1995Apr12.205620.2950@unislc.slc.unisys.com>
Organization: Unisys Corporation SLC
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 1995 20:56:20 GMT
Lines: 31

uh331ao@sun4.lrz-muenchen.de wrote:
: jriechel@cc.gatech.edu (James Alan Riechel) writes:
: >a combination of transistors and possibly some other stuff.  I don't know
: >exactly, but each data latch requires a very large number of atoms!

: IC technology has actually become a lot better these days. There are 
: memory cells now that use less than 10 electrons for a bit (quantum dots,
: or STM surface storage that uses 1 atom/bit). There are already prototype
: STM disc implementations at IBM Research that store may Terabytes per
: square centimeter and read out at a 100kHz. 

: Of course, your original argument still stands :-) !


Let's just play with that argument a little.  A theoretical limit to the
number of bits that the universe can store would be to examine how many
atoms there are in the universe, and to count the number of positions
these atoms can occupy.  Given a crude estimate of 10^50 atoms in the
universe another crude estimate that the number of locations we could
put these atoms is 10^200  (estimating the universe to be a cube that has
~ 10^60 storage cells per side), we get the number of states that the
universe can be in by a crude equation, (10^50) ^ (10^200), which is
close enough considering the factors of errors involved to 10 ^ ( 10 ^ 201)
to not make a difference, and since we are talking about computers here,
this equates to about 3.2 * 10 ^ 201 bits that the 'Deep Thought' computer
can store, and this should be well enough bits to store the perfect
chess game.     :)


--
  Trent Tobler
