Shannon's Number
No, 867-5309 is Jenny's <serious>
I stumbled across Shannon’s Number today after I finished a game of online Chess. I had googled “Chess Permutations” and was not at all surprised to see there was not only an answer, but an entire branch of mathematics devoted to the subject. Shannon’s number is essentially the potential possible “games” of chess that can exist. The number of possible game permutations is 10^120. This is larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe (only 10^80). This number is so unfathomably large it’s not worth attempting to fathom. You can be pretty confident, though, every time you play a game of chess that lasts 40+ moves, no one in the history of time has played an identical game. In a world where true novelty is hard to come by, I feel proud knowing every game I play, I am 1 in a 10^120.
While I feel an unearned sense of pride in the uniqueness of my chess games, the sheer abundance of possibilities simultaneously fills me with a sense of existential dread. Chess is an unsolvable game (short of a breakthrough in Quantum computing) which means that there is no known optimized series of moves to definitively force victory as either White or Black. Thank god for this. If Chess was “solved” the game as we know it would cease to exist. It would be treated as trivial as tic-tac-toe, and I wouldn’t know what to do with the extra hours of my week when I would otherwise be playing.
This concept of “insolvability” echoes a sentiment I am feeling in my work currently. We are experiencing our largest period of growth in our company, ERIN’s, short life: we have many large enterprise customers using the product daily, while onboarding more each month. Simultaneously propping up the product and supporting our current customers, while building and selling new features to attract additional customers is causing a strain on our finite resources. It reminds me of defending and attacking simultaneously while down a piece in Chess. I wish I could open a book or boot up an engine to tell me the optimal next moves to victory, but I have accepted that this is impossible. In fact I should not only accept this fact, I should be grateful - it is what makes my job so interesting and enjoyable.
Like in Chess, no one has never been in our company’s exact position at this exact point in time with our exact resources and issues. Our issues are “unsolvable” in an academic sense of the word. That being said, there is a path to victory I am sure, we will just have to find it over the board.