“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.”
– Emo Philips
Most amateurs who’ve tried playing chess can agree on one thing: the basic rules aren’t hard to follow, but learning to play well is incredibly difficult. There’s a reason that the “game of kings” is associated with mind-bending strategic thinking, MENSA-level IQs, and supercomputers: the Shannon number—a calculation of all the possible iterations of moves in games of chess. Calculated by mathematician and cryptographer Claude Shannon in 1950 for a study on teaching a computer to play chess, the Shannon number is between 10^111 and 10^123. Incredibly, that’s substantially larger than the number of atoms in the known universe—a mere 10^81. It’s no wonder the game is a nail-biting brain teaser.
Bonus: also in 1950, Shannon invented Theseus, a magnetic mouse. Named for the maze-running hero of Greek mythology, Theseus was programmed to “learn” to navigate mazes, and may be the first rudimentary form of artificial intelligence.
Wobble Chess Set | $250
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