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Chess is a two-player board game believed to have been played in India as early as the sixth century AD. In different parts of this world, different chess games are played. The most played variants are western chess, Shogi (in Japan), and Xiangqi (in China).
The western version of chess is a game played on an 
board, called a chessboard,
of alternating black and white squares. Pieces with different types of allowed moves
are placed on the board, a set of black pieces in the first two rows and a set of
white pieces in the last two rows. The pieces are called the bishop (2), king (1),
knight (2), pawn (8), queen (1), and rook (2). The object of the game is to capture
the opponent's king.
In Ingmar Bergman's 1958 film classic The Seventh Seal, a Knight and his squire arrive home from the crusades to find Black Death sweeping their country. As they approach home, Death appears to the knight and tells him it is his time. The knight then challenges Death to a chess game for his life. Chess also appears as one of the games known to the WOPR computer in the 1983 film WarGames.
Hardy (1999, p. 17) estimated the number of possible games of chess as 
. The number of possible games
of 40 moves or less 
is approximately 
(Beeler et al. 1972), a number arrived at by estimating the number of pawn
positions (in the no-captures situation, this is 
), multiplying by the possible positions for all pieces,
then dividing by two for each of the (rook, knight) pairs that are interchangeable,
and dividing by two for each pair of bishops (since half the positions will have
the bishops on the same color squares). (However, note that there are more positions
with one or two captures, since the pawns can then switch columns; Schroeppel 1996.)
Shannon (1950) gave the estimate
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Rex Stout's fictional detective Nero Wolfe quotes the number of possible games after ten moves as follows: "Wolfe grunted. One hundred and sixty-nine million, five
hundred and eighteen thousand, eight hundred and twenty-nine followed by twenty-one
ciphers. The number of ways the first ten moves, both sides, may be played"
(Stout 1983). To be precise, the number of distinct chess positions after 
moves for 
,
2, ... are 20, 400, 5362, 71852, 809896?, 9132484?, ... (Schwarzkopf 1994, OEIS A019319). The number of chess games that end in
exactly 
moves (including games that mate in fewer
than 
plies) for 
, 2, 3, ... are 20, 400, 8902, 197742, 4897256, 120921506,
3284294545, ... (OEIS A006494).
Cunningham (1889) incorrectly found 
games and 
positions after the fourth move. C. Flye St. Marie
was the first to find the correct number of positions after four moves: 
. Dawson (1946) gives the source as Intermediare des
Mathematiques (1895), but K. Fabel writes that Flye St. Marie corrected
the number 
(that he found in 1895) to 
in 1903. The history of the determination of the chess sequences is discussed in
Schwarzkopf (1994).
The analysis of chess is extremely complicated due to the many possible options at each move. Steinhaus (1999, pp. 11-14), as well as many entire books, consider clever end-game positions which may be analyzed completely.
Two problems in recreational mathematics ask the questions
1. How many pieces of a given type can be placed on a chessboard without any two attacking?
2. What is the smallest number of pieces needed to occupy or attack every square?
The answers are given for the usual 
chessboard in the following
table (Madachy 1979).
| problem | max. | min. |
| bishops problem | 14 | 8 |
| kings problem | 16 | 9 |
| knights problem | 32 | 12 |
| queens problem | 8 | 5 |
| rooks problem | 8 | 8 |
