Submission #2768: Weirwindle's NES Battle Chess "Fastest Mate" in 04:19.54

Nintendo Entertainment System
Fastest Mate
FCEUX 2.1.4a
15598
60.0988138974405
40
Unknown
Battle Chess (U).nes
Submitted by Weirwindle on 7/30/2010 1:24:26 AM
Submission Comments
The priority of this run is to finish a game of chess against the default level opponent in the least number of moves possible.

Objectives

  • Emulator used: FCEUX 2.1.4a
  • Aims for fastest time to checkmate
  • Uses a suboptimal opening move to be made so that any opening books preprogrammed into Battle Chess will be obsolete.
  • Manipulates computer analysis through blunders
  • Minimizes piece exchanges as to cut out fight scenes
My first tactic was to open with a move to quickly render the engine's opening book void. There were several candidates for this including the moves 1. g3, 1. h3 etc. Using these lines I opted for quick advancement for one of my bishops and queen due to the large amount of board that they need to cover quickly.
During the first tryout of this game I was able to checkmate in less than 12 moves using Rybka 4 (the best chess engine software to date) and repeatedly trying to blunder the opponent until a quick checkmate.
One thing that limited and quickened a last exhaustive search for a win is that the opponents choice of a move never changes for a certain situation. I limited my search tree to 5 branches per move (choosen by Rybka) so 5 choices ^ 8 moves = 400000 possible lines.
I pruned out those moves that held many piece exchanges, those that did not advance either the queen or bishop, and those that led to useless moves like castling my king or advancing both knights, or advancing more than 3 pawns. This left me with about 13 hours of searching by hand with a little lua script help to take away action scenes.
When I was finished I had three possibilities for a mate in 8 moves. One consisted of 4 piece exchanges() and the other two had 3. Those two were
1. g3 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 Nxd4 4. Nxe5 Bc5 5. e3 Nf5 6. Bc4 f6 7. Qd5 fxe5 8. Qf7# in 15883 frames and 1. h3 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 Nxd4 4. Nxe5 Bc5 5. e3 Nf5 6. Bc4 f6 7. Qd5 fxe5 8. Qf7# in 15598 frames
Any room for improvement will be by increasing the number of choices per move and a lot of lua scripting.
Last Edited by adelikat on 11/29/2022 3:56 PM
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