A single integer N = a complete chess game

[Andrew Weimholt]

 On 4/10/08, David Wilson <davidwwilson at comcast.net> wrote:

 > The position from which 218 moves is possible is a contrived position
 > involving multiple promoted queens. Positions reached in serious
 > over-the-board play do not approach that number of possible moves. I also
 > suspect that there are moves that are much more likely to occur in
 > over-the-board play, making Huffman encoding seem like a possible avenue for
 > shrinking the game description.
 >

 If one is only concerned with minimizing the size of the numbers used
 to represent a chess game, and not with the ease at which a number can
 be converted back to a game, then you can simply define a way to order
 all the possible chess games, and use the index into this list to
 represent the game.

 Andrew