For comparison to that 10^120^ possible game states, the number of atoms in the universe is only 10^82^ and the amount of time until the "Dark Era" of the universe (after all the stars have died and even all the black holes have decayed via Hawking radiation) is only 10^114^ to 10^117^ seconds. In other words, it really is literally impossible either to build a computer big enough to store all the board states or to write them all down even if you did.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

is only 10^114^ to 10^117^ seconds

I mean a good program could do a 100 million states/s . So if you could make a computer that lasts until the end of the universe it could go through all of them I guess?

With supercomputers, probably way more, that's just the figure for like a laptop. Plus you could filter out all the states that are symmetric and stuff and lower it by one order of magnitude.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I guess, maybe?

I'm not prepared to speculate on the performance of a computer literally larger than the universe.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

that's the most fun type of speculation. No fun speculating over computers that could emulate realistic things like all states of a rubiks cube, cause that's probably already been done.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

...hey, wait a second, you pulled a fast one on me with that "100 million states/s" silliness!

I just remembered what the time boundary I was talking about was actually trying to measure: it had nothing to do with the speed of computation; it was the speed of typing in the program code. That's why 1 state per second was a reasonable estimate (if not overly optimistic). If you tried to type in all those ifs and prints manually, that's what would take you longer than the heat death of the universe.

Besides, even executing the program can't do 100 million states per second because it only does one state transition and then waits for user input.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago

Oh I was assuming you'd write another program to create this program, like the "4 billion if's" blog post if you've read it.