English

How to program a never-losing chess engine

Computer Science and Game Theory 2026-06-24 v1

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 variant of that algorithm which is required 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.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.09715,
  title  = {How to program a never-losing chess engine},
  author = {Fabio Romano},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.09715},
  year   = {2026}
}