Winning or losing in chess - a question of combinatorics?

Question

I have observed that every chess game can be assumed as a sequence of moves that lead either to win or to lose (in a few cases to a drawn game). It is very interesting to Count all the moves that are possible in any chess game. May be $N$ the number of chess moves done in a game (contains moves done by white AND by black). Depending on the previous chess moves one can Count the number of chess moves $n_i$ for the move number $i$ that are possible. But how many possibilities are there for winning or losing related to all possible chess games? Is there any literature dealing with this question?

Answer 1

Counting the number of possible paths of play is related to the task of actually solving chess, upon which there has been a lot of research. The difficulty is that there are incredibly many ways that chess can actually play out, which you hint at. I have seen in quoted that there are more possible paths of play than there at atoms in the universe. WolframAlpha tells me there are about $10^{80}$ atoms in the universe, so presumably there are more chess moves than that. Anyway, this is such a fun topic there's a Wikipedia page on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess