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There have been several questions regarding the possible number of chess games. for example; Database of every possible move in chess. However,can there be an estimate on the number of "allowable" chess positions?

For another example, White pawns cannot occupy the first row and Black pawns cannot occupy the eighth row. If a given chess piece is occupying a square, then another chess piece cannot occupy that. Using simple elimination rules coded, can we have an estimate on the number of unique positions that chess pieces can have since they would be reducing in number? An upper bound on positions before applying any elimination rules would be the sum of (64 C 32 + 64 C 32 ... + 64 C 2). This is less than 10^20. With elimination rules, they should be significantly lower.

Any ideas on how elimination rules are written for chess pieces?

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    Your estimate is too low. You shouldn't just compute combinations, it matters which pieces are on which squares.
    – Dag Oskar Madsen
    Jun 16, 2014 at 10:36
  • The maths goes like you choose the 32 squares possible, and find number of pieces you can place on each square. Then multiply 64 C 32
    – QuIcKmAtHs
    Dec 27, 2017 at 12:25
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    The number of legal chess positions is roughly 4x10^44: github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking
    – John Tromp
    Aug 8, 2021 at 15:39
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    Does this answer your question? Is the number of possible chess games infinite?
    – BCLC
    Nov 6, 2021 at 18:02
  • A serious answer should, I think, at least give a nod to the restrictions that the positions should be those 'in a chess game'. Thus it is not just legal positions, but also that they have to follow each other like pearls on a string: when one pawn is moved, or a piece captured, this immediately puts additional restrictions on the positions that can follow. It's fairly easy to estimate an upper limit -- but getting at any correction terms appears to be close to imponderable
    – user30536
    Mar 7 at 17:49

3 Answers 3

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Upper bounds on the number of allowable positions are discussed on the Shannon number Wikipedia page.

There is an accepted upper bound of 1.8x10^46 by Shirish Chinchalkar, and an accurate estimate of 4.8x10^44 by John Tromp.

By comparison, the number of atoms on earth is about 10^50.

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  • The article fairly estimates the positions to be close to 10^50. Link is nwchess.com/articles/misc/Chess_Board_Positions_article.pdf
    – shoonya
    Jun 16, 2014 at 9:34
  • However this can be computed to a far better estimate, especially the cases when Kings are already in checks, Kings are simultaneously in check. The key thing being estimating this can allow us to typically find the optimal moves for a given position.
    – shoonya
    Jun 16, 2014 at 10:11
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    @JohnTromp Do you have a new reference?
    – Dag Oskar Madsen
    Mar 7 at 11:50
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    @JohnTromp and 'accurate' is subjective - you might want to add the uncertainty.
    – Glorfindel ♦
    Mar 7 at 13:11
  • Is the editor hijacking the answer here? Is that really allowed?
    – user30536
    Mar 7 at 17:53
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Old question, but for people who just want a quick estimate they can do with basic math this is an easy way to go about it

If we consider all 32 pieces, we can rearrange them P(64,32) or 64 permute 32 ways. If we then consider 31 pieces, we do the same as above with P(64,31) but this time we must factor in the choice of 31 out of the 32 pieces so we multiply P(64,31) by C(32,31) or 32 choose 31. If we continue along this manner we have the sum from n =2 to 32 of P(64,n)C(32,n) which gives 1.24e54 which is only a few orders of magnitude larger than the number given by Vicor Allis.

Note that in the assumptions, we allowed illegal positions, and double or triple counted certain positions by treating each piece as distinct. But the number is reasonable compared to that above and more importantly is easily attainable with pretty basic math.

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  • @DagOskarMadsen I did notice you have a PhD in math, so does this upper bound seem reasonable or is there a way to improve it?
    – Colin Hicks
    Jul 21, 2020 at 4:58
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    It's a start. You also have to take promotions into account which will make this bound much larger.
    – Dag Oskar Madsen
    Jul 21, 2020 at 12:32
  • @DagOskarMadsen ah yes. I changed C(32,n) to C(96,n) to allow for all 16 pawns to assume the identity of the 4 other piece types other than king but now the value is 1.454e79 which is fairly off the mark haha
    – Colin Hicks
    Jul 21, 2020 at 17:24
  • Wikipedia mentions 2x10^40 as the best known upper bound without promotions.
    – Dag Oskar Madsen
    Jul 21, 2020 at 18:18
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It is really difficult to find out legal positions but total positions possible is 13^64 , assuming each piece can be positioned in every available square

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