It's quite interesting for people not so interested in chess, too :) , the linked presentation ( <a href="http://www.gilith.com/research/talks/psu2011.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.gilith.com/research/talks/psu2011.pdf</a> ) talks about software testing and static analysis.<p>And the people at Galois seem to be making advances in applying formal methods to the real world ( <a href="http://corp.galois.com/formal-methods" rel="nofollow">http://corp.galois.com/formal-methods</a> ).
This work was done in 2005. The author's paper "Formal verification of chess endgame databases" is available at <a href="http://gilith.com/research/papers/chess.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://gilith.com/research/papers/chess.pdf</a>