Programming Advice for HUGE Numbers

[slinga]

Hey guys,

I'm a pretty crappy programmer, but I got a crazy side project I want to do some work on. (I'm also bad at math, so I have no way of realizing how feasible this is.)

What I'm trying to do is loop through every possible 64 character string imaginable, where the legal characters are 0-9,A,B,C. So I'm guessing on the order of ~13^64 possible strings.

Something like:

0000....................000

0000....................001

0000....................002

...

...

...

CCC....................CCA

CCC....................CCB

CCC....................CCC

And the string has to be an array, because I need to search each component individually. For example I have to be able to determine if the array contains a B or a 9, and the only way I know how to do that is to have a nested for loop search each index of the array until I find that value.

So anyway I'm rambling on, one problem at a time, how do I store a value of 13^64 in C? Do I even have enough ram (yep I'm REALLY terrible at math). Thanks in advance.

 

[antime]

You would get better suggestions if you actually stated the problem you're trying to solve, but to loop through all strings just treat the letters as the digits of a number and count up.

 

[slinga]

Estimating the number of legal chess positions (not possible games) on a standard chess board. Shit man stop laughing, I told you it was crazy.

Anyway my super huge over-estimate is 13^64. These aren't LEGAL chess positions, just possible positions. So I'm trying to reduce the estimate to something far manageable.

 

[antime]

I wouldn't try to brute-force the solution unless you have a lot of time. The number of legal positions is estimated to be at least 10^43.

 

[M3d10n]

Not quite the answer for your question, but maybe this can help?

 

[it290]

Sorry, sort of off-topic, but that article was pretty interesting. I was actually just having a conversation about computer chess before reading this. After reading through some of the articles, I was wondering- does anyone know of a 'non-searching' (bad terminology) chess program? That is, one which tries to use a more human playing style, and not just brute force? I think that would make for an interesting game.