This paper presents details of the chess mate solver application, which is a part of the author’s Geniss general chess application. The problem chess is an important domain connected with solving of the chess problems. The Geniss Mate Solver (.) application solves Mate-in-N-move problems. Main techniques used for the implementation of the application are full-width searching with Alpha-Beta pruning technique and zero evaluation function. | Yugoslav Journal of Operations Research 14 (2004), Number 2, 273-288 REALIZATION OF THE CHESS MATE SOLVER APPLICATION Vladan V. VUČKOVIĆ Faculty of Electronic Engineering, University of Niš, Niš, Serbia & Montenegro vladan@ Received: July 2003 / Accepted: June 2004 Abstract: This paper presents details of the chess mate solver application, which is a part of the author’s Geniss general chess application. The problem chess is an important domain connected with solving of the chess problems. The Geniss Mate Solver (.) application solves Mate-in-N-move problems. Main techniques used for the implementation of the application are full-width searching with Alpha-Beta pruning technique and zero evaluation function. The application is written in Delphi for Windows programming environment and the searching engine is completely coded in assembly language (about 10000 lines). This hybrid software structure enables efficient program development by using high-level programming environment and the realization of a very fast searching engine at the same time. The machine code is manually coded and could achieve above 7 million generated positions per second on the 1Ghz Celeron PC. Keywords: Computer chess, game tree searching, alpha-beta optimization algorithm, decision theory. 1. INTRODUCTION The problem chess is one of the important fields of a chess game regardless of its relative minor popularity compared to classic chess. It comprises some interesting disciplines like self-mates, helpmates or mate-in-N-move problems. The common characteristics of these disciplines and the main goal of the problem chess are to find the shortest sequence of moves providing a mate against the opponent king, commonly black one. In the great amount of problems the white side is on the move trying to mate the black king with or without opponents help. Composition and solving of the chess problems require great imagination and creativity (Grand, 1986; Schlosser, 1988; Wiereyn,
