Programming challenge

Apparently David Bolton has been putting on programming challenges for a while but I just happend across it for the first time today. I’ve always been a fan of strategy games ( Chess, AdvancedWars, etc ). I might have to enter…

To summarize a bit:
It is a board game puzzle. The program that is able to calculate its way to a winning sequence of moves, in the fewest moves, wins; and shortest execution time is the tie-breaker. Check out the site for the full rules.

Notice that you can read ahead in the move/input files. This means, given my rough understanding of the rules, achieving victory is guarenteed, and probably in not more than 20 moves, probably a lot less actually. Also, there IS a fewest moves solution and you have all the knowledge necessary to calculate it.

So, first problem, find the fewest moves solution by brute force if necessary. Then, make it faster while you check the output against the brute-force-known-solution for accuracy.

I imagine a few papers on chess engine architecture and design would be very useful. Also, he should really post his cpu cache size