Abstract

Abstract Kriegspiel is a chess variant invented to make chess more similar to real warfare. In a Kriegspiel game the players have to deal with incomplete information because they are not informed of their opponent’s moves. Each player tries to guess the position of the opponent’s pieces as the game progresses by trying moves that can be either legal or illegal with respect to the real situation: a referee accepts the legal moves and rejects the illegal ones. However the latter are most useful to gain insight into the opponent’s position. While in the past this game has been popular in research centres such as the RAND Institute, currently it is played mostly over the Internet Chess Club. The paper describes the rationale and design of a Kriegspiel program to play the ending for King and Rook versus King. Such a kind of ending has been theoretically shown to be won for White, however no programs exist that play the related positions perfectly. We introduce an evaluation function to play these simple Kriegspiel positions, and evaluate it.

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