Finiteness: life and chess

Both life and chess are finite, bounded. But both seem to be infinite to players participating in either event.

A chess game can go on and on for years but some carefully drawn rules made it finite. However, even if a game goes on and on over years (without those rules) chess is still finite; number of all possible games of chess is calculated and its a problem already solved by mathematicians.

There are several discussions over finiteness of chess games, in first look chess may seem to be infinite to many, in fact I too had the same idea in the begining. But in 1990's I finally realized that its anyway finite. Look in rec.games.chess.analysis for similar discussions. One starting point of one such discussion is:

Newsgroups: rec.games.chess.analysis
Date: 1997/05/05
"Number of all possible games of chess is finite. Its a huge finite number, but its finite. So one day ( I don't know how soon ) computers will definitely beat human beings in all chess games. So what's the big deal about this Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match? thanks, som."
(for more discussion on this click here )

In case of life, we also seem to forget that life is finite too! One human life, all possible human life (even the solar system, galaxy and beyond..) everything is finite: going to end one day! But our day to day activity, our entire effort to construct something permanent, our whole effort to build up things for future never ends. In fact, if we look deep inside our life, we will find that we spent most of the time building our future, a pemanent stable future which doesn't exist :-)

This view may look too pesimistic to many, but its a hard fact that we aren't too bothered about the knowledge that everthing around us is really temporary (including our solar system and beyond). I am sure this information is not new to many and its not going to change soon!

So, here lies the similarity between chess and life: both seem to be infinite in the begining, but both are finite in nature when you look carefully! Even though we understand this very well we don't care much about this kind of hard facts, we still treat them as infinite objects!

In both cases, this feeling of infinity within a finiteness is the beauty we enjoy!