How Many Miles to Babylon? In the 1824 edition of "The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia" there's a description of the rhyme and the game, giving the distance as "six, seven or a lang eight". The rhyme was originally accompanied by a singing game in which two lines face each other, with one player in the middle. At the end of the rhyme the players have to cross the space and any caught help the original player in the middle catch the others. The game seems to have fallen out of use in the twentieth century. In literature In film In music How Many Miles to Babylon?
Chess and is provably less than 10, with a game-tree complexity of approximately 10. The game-tree complexity of chess was first calculated by Claude Shannon as 10, a number known as the Shannon number. Typically an average position has thirty to forty possible moves, but there may be as few as zero (in the case of checkmate or stalemate) or (in a constructed position) as many as 218. Chess has inspired many combinatorial puzzles, such as the knight's tour and the eight queens puzzle. The idea of creating a chess-playing machine dates to the 18th century; around 1769, the chess-playing automaton