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arXiv · 2607.09715

How to program a never-losing chess engine

Fabio Romano
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Abstract

This article proposes a model, based on graph theory, to represent a variety of two-player games of perfect information, such as chess and checkers. I then provide a backtracking minimax algorithm to find, if it exists, a perfect game strategy (game resolution), and subsequently a way to exploit that algorithm to determine a weaker condition: the existence of a strategy to never lose (always reach at least a draw). Of course, this does not mean that in practice the algorithm can find such a strategy in a short time, but here we are only concerned with formally proving that this is possible, at least theoretically.

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Fabio Romano. 2026-06-24. How to program a never-losing chess engine. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09715

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