= Shannon number
{wiki=Shannon_number}
The Shannon number, named after the mathematician and electrical engineer Claude Shannon, is an estimate of the lower bound of the game-tree complexity of chess. It represents the total number of possible unique chess positions that can arise during a game. The Shannon number is approximately \\(10^\{120\}\\), which illustrates the vast complexity of chess and indicates that there are far more possible chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe.
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