Consecutive Checks: How many are possible?
Hi all,
I had a slightly random thought yesterday. I'm not sure why, but I found myself wondering "How many consecutive checks is it possible to deliver?" By this I mean, White gives a check and Black responds with a check of his own. My first thought was a trivial example such as the below case.
Here we have six consecutive checks. At this point I'm going to set some parameters - I don't want situations where we assume all 16 pawns have promoted so we can drop endless queens on to a square. Only original pieces and pawns are allowed. It may seem this slows us down, but you might notice a possible improvement if we use other pieces cunningly.
This started to turn the wheels of my brain, and the idea of blocking with check got interesting. My current best try is the following.
The underpromotion theme was very fun to integrate, as well as trying to find new ways to block with a discovery. I believe there must be improvements that can be made to this, or potentially an entirely different method, even though I can't see anything else.
In closing, I have a couple of questions for anyone reading this. Firstly, this must have been considered before. I can imagine someone like Sam Lloyd, or similar, having a field day with this sort of thing. Maybe someone has figured a way to attack this with an engine (god knows how). Does anyone have information about these previous attempts?
The second question is simple. Can you do better?
