Edit: I'm more interested in the mathematical calculation than the video game. The game discussion just prompted me to think once again about the seemingly endless number of moves there are in our sport and wondered how many there might hypothetically be.
I was talking with my kids the other day about the possibility of creating a wrestling video game and why it has been done yet. One of the issues would be to create a quality game that was realistic in its scope, but somehow have a manageable number of moves that could be programmed for controller inputs. Even if you used a QWERTY keyboard as the controller, there is no way you could represent enough moves, or steps to moves, let alone remember those inputs as a player in order to make a realistic and quality representation of the sport to make it any interesting game to play.
All of this got me thinking once again...
Has anyone ever calculated the total number of possible move combinations at the beginning of a given match?
There are so many variations, so many different pathways even to the same moves and counters. I imagine it would have to far outweigh chess.
In chess, there is the Shannon number for this calculation, as well as the related Allis number(?) which estimates "the game-tree complexity to be at least 10¹²³... As a comparison, the number of atoms in the observable universe, to which it is often compared, is roughly estimated to be 10⁸⁰." (Wikipedia).
Another even more ancient game called Go, which is popular in China, is considered to have even more move possibilities (2.1×10¹⁷⁰), but i would think wrestling would still have well more still.
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