Sorry if it's not appropriate for this site. But is anybody interested in chess research? I've seen that people here might be interested in chess. For example, here's a chess post barely related to AI.

Intro

In chess, what positions have the longest forced wins? "Mate in N" positions can be split into 3 types:

1. Positions which use "tricks" to get a big number of moves before checkmate. Such as cycles of repeating moves. For example, this manmade mate in 415 (see the last position) uses obvious cycles. Not to mention mates in omega.
2. Tablebase checkmates, discovered by brute force, showing absolutely incomprehensible play with no discernible logic. See this mate in 549 moves. One should assume it's based on some hidden cycles or something?
3. Positions which are similar to immortal games. Where the winning variation requires a combination without any cycles. For example: Kasparov's Immortal (14 moves long combination), Stoofvlees vs. Igel (down a rook for 21 moves) - the examples lack optimal play tho.

Surprisingly, nobody seems to look for the longest mates of Type 3. Well, I did look for them and discovered some. Down below I'll explain multiple ways to define what exactly I did. Won't go into too much detail. If you want more detail - Research idea: the longest non-trivial middlegames. There you also can see the puzzles I've created.

My longest puzzle is 42 moves: https://lichess.org/study/sTon08Mb/JG4YGbcP Overall, I've created 7 unique puzzles. Worked a lot on 1 more (mate in 52 moves), but couldn't make it work.

Among other things, I made this absurd mate in 34 puzzle. Almost the entire board is filled with pieces (62 pieces on the board!), only two squares are empty. And despite that the position has deep content. It's kinda a miracle. I think it deserves recognition.

Definition 1

Unlike Type 1 and Type 2 mates, my mates involve many sacrifices of material. So my mates can be defined as "the longest sacrificial combinations".

Definition 2

We can come up with important metrics which make a long mate more special, harder to find, more rare. Material disbalance, amount of non-check moves, amount of freedom of pieces, etc. Then we can search for the longest mates compatible with high enough values of those metrics.

Well, that's what I did.

Definition 3

This is an idea of a definition rather than a definition. But it might be important.

• Take a sequential game with perfect information.
• Take positions with the longest forced wins.
• Out of those positions, choose positions where the defending side has the greatest control over the attacking side's optimal strategy.

My mates are an example of positions where the defending side has especially great control over the flow of the game.

Deeper meaning?

Can there be any deep meaning behind researching my type of mates? I think yes. There are two relevant things.

1. First thing is hard to explain, because I'm not a mathematician. But I'll try. Math can often be seen as skipping stuff which is the most interesting to humans. For example, math can prove theorems about games in general, without explaining why a specific game is interesting or why a specific position is interesting. However, here it seems like we can define something very closely related to subjective "interestingness".
2. Hardness of defining valuable things is relevant to Alignment. The definitions above reveal that maybe sometimes valuable things are easier to define than it seems.

Reception

How did chess community receive my work?

• On Reddit, some posts got a moderate amount of upvotes (enough to get into daily top). A silly middlegame position. With checkmate in 50-80 moves? (110+); Does this position set any record? (60+). Sadly the pattern didn't continue: New long non-trivial middlegame mate found. Nobody asked for this. (1).
• On a computer chess forum, people mostly ignored it. I hoped they could help me find the longest attacks in computer games.
• On the Discord of chess composers, a bunch of people complimented my project. But nobody showed any proactive interest (e.g. "hey, I'd like to preserve your work"). One person reacted like ~"I'm not a specialist on that type of thing, I don't know with whom you could talk about that"
• On Reddit communities where you can ask mathematicians things, people told that game theory is too abstract for tackling such things.