Development of a Program for Playing Progressive Chess

We present the design of a computer program for playing Progressive Chess. In this game, rather than just making one move per turn, players play progressively longer series of moves. Our program follows the generally recommended strategy for this game, which consists of three phases: looking for possibilities to checkmate the opponent, playing generally good moves when no checkmate can be found, and preventing checkmates from the opponent. In this paper, we focus on efficiently searching for checkmates, putting to test various heuristics for guiding the search. We also present the findings of self-play experiments between different versions of the program.