"Claude Shannon calculated that there are around 10^120 possible games of chess in his seminal paper Programming a Computer for Playing Chess in 1950." I've ju

"Claude Shannon calculated that there are around 10^120 possible games of chess in his seminal paper Programming a Computer for Playing Chess in 1950." I've just finished a weekend project to calculate the number of legal chess positions and there are about 8.8E+45: https://github.com/lechmazur/ChessCounter https://github.com/lechmazur/ChessCounter. For people considering making a chess program, take a look at this message board http://talkchess.com/forum3/index.php http://talkchess.com/forum3/index.php. As the author mentions, python-chess is really nice. The project maintainers are very responsive - a bug I found was fixed within a day.