A Random Fact Randomly Found

This is completely out of this world- and dates back 50+ years. From Wikipedia:

The Shannon number, named after Claude Shannon, is an estimated lower bound on the game-tree complexity of chess. Shannon calculated it as an aside in his 1950 paper "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess".

How complex is chess? What are the number of possible variations, iterations and whatever -ations you can think of? Back to Wikipedia. Shannon calculated that:

there will be 10¹²⁰ (10 to the 120th power) variations to be calculated from the initial position. ... Victor Allis extimated it as 10¹²³(10 to the 123rd power).

In case you don't understand the incredible size of that number, the number of atoms in the observable universe is estimated at (only) between 4×10⁷⁹ and 10⁸¹

Staggering. No wonder I had such a hard time winning.

Wikipedia Link.