Chess Challenger was a game originally programmed for the Colecovision in 1983 by Fidelity Electronics but was never commercially released, with only a few demo cartridges of the game ever being produced. In 2011, Collectorvision got hold of one of the rare demo carts, turned it into a finished game, and finally released it to the public.

Objectives

Difficulty

The hardest difficulty (Level 3) was chosen here. See the "Level 1" TAS I submitted alongside this one if you want to watch something with shorter load times.

Routing

The goal is not necessarily to checkmate in the least number of moves but to deliver the checkmate that makes the computer "think" the least (of course, reducing the number of moves does help significantly). Shorter "thinking" times are achieved by keeping the position simple. Giving the computer few options and not attacking with a lot of pieces simultaneously is a good way to minimize thinking times.

The Computer's Weakness? IT HAS NO OPENING DATABASE!!

That's a real problem. No joke, if the computer determines it's safe to make an opening move, it could just make a random pawn move. And I mean random. g4 and f4, which are notoriously some of the worst pawn moves because they weaken king safety, are fair game as far as the computer is concerned. I would've expected far better from the "hardest" computer difficulty in any chess program. We take full advantage of this by manipulating the computer to move f4, h4, and after a small effort, the game is quickly put away.

Playing as Black

I selected black for this TAS because it turns out the computer is much more willing to make bad pawn moves as white than as black, essentially falling for some longer variation of the Fool's Mate.

RNG

Computer moves here are determined with a fairly wide degree of randomness compared to other board games on old consoles. Fortunately, RNG can be manipulated through the timing and type of both cursor movements and moves—meaning it is, like, really easy to manipulate. This is great because if the computer decides it's safe to make an opening move, there's a good chance we can get it to make a bad pawn move.

Not only can the above actions manipulate what the computer moves, but also when, even if the resultant move is he same. This makes a little less sense to me how computer thinking times can be manipulated in this way but I guess it must call RNG during some point(s) in its search algorithm. In any cases, I tested this extensively to make sure the computer made each move in the least time possible.

Game Summary

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: As with the "Level 1" branch, you did the same great work to exploit the game's inability to perform well on the "White" side.

Accepting to "Standard" for publication.

despoa: Processing...