Modeling and verification of chess game using NuSMV

Abstract

Gaming industry has always relied on testing their product by playing it extensively. However, testers have their own limitations. When such a product is deployed, extreme gamers find those bugs that were overlooked by the testers. Hence testing is a best-effort service and does not assure that a particular product is working bug free. Application of formal methods to games is a vast area, but less explored. It has been applied to some of the simple games like Tic-Tac-Toe, Rush-Hour etc. Formalizing a chess game is complex since the game can enter a countably infinite number of states. In this paper we build a model which takes a sequence of moves (called as "Notation" in Chess Community) as input and verify that standard rules of the game are not violated. Specifications are written using LTL (Linear-Time Temporal Logic). We have used NuSMV (extension of Symbolic Model Verifier) as a model checking tool to verify the LTL specifications. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.