On average a player has about 40 legal move options, so you can imagine that the number of scenarios will get enormous as the game continues. This means that after just two moves, a game can be in 400 different positions. At the start of a game, each player has sixteen pieces with a total of twenty possible moves (two for each of the eight pawns, plus two for each knight). If you try making a decision tree you will soon find an exponential explosion, as visualized in Figure 1. The answer is simple, although the field of chess is only eight by eight, it is too complex. Therefore, it is a beautiful problem to target with math. For quite some time chess had clearly defined rules, having complete information for all possible states while each state can be evaluated. These kinds of changes made the game more accessible, but the base remained the same. Pawns got the ability to move two squares in their first move and Queens could go ‘mad’ as the Italians liked to call the abilities of the modern queen. Throughout the years, the rules of the game varied a bit to make the game run faster. Our modern version of European chess can be traced back to the fifteenth century. When stating it like this, it sounds very well optimizable, so let’s see how far we have gotten over the years. All these factors support a common goal: to help her study as many paths and combinations as possible. Studying others’ theories, having a geek-team, and the occasional pills give her an edge. It is, however, notable that even she cannot perform at the top simply on her own merits. The series follows this clearly brilliant girl emerging in the US chess world. eBay revealed there was a 273% surge in searches for ‘chess sets’ on the auction site in the weeks following the show’s release. The chess hype that the Netflix series ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ has sparked is unprecedented.
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