ChessCounter VS Ceres

You don't need to care about possible games, but game states, what's the best result and the move to achieve it in each. Another user computed an upper bound at 8.7E+45 positions: https://github.com/lechmazur/ChessCounter . I pointed out that our planet has about 1E+50 atoms. And we can further compress the database by perhaps two orders of magnitude if we don't store symmetric positions or positions close to mate. A Kardashev 2 civilization could play perfect chess.

"Claude Shannon calculated that there are around 10^120 possible games of chess in his seminal paper Programming a Computer for Playing Chess in 1950. "

I've just finished a weekend project to calculate the number of legal chess positions and there are about 8.5E+45: https://github.com/lechmazur/ChessCounter.

For people considering making a chess program, take a look at this message board http://talkchess.com/forum3/index.php.

something like this exists already it's called Ceres https://github.com/dje-dev/Ceres/releases/tag/v0.94

That being said it is not clear which approach is better e.g. a very smart but relatively slow evaluation function (Leela) or SFs approach to use a relatively dumb eval function with a more sophisticated search. It is pretty clear that Leelas search can be improved (Check https://github.com/dje-dev/Ceres for example)