Let’s assume the GUI is facilitating a match between a human user and an engine. Let’s say the user starts with e2e4. Then the commands would look something like: // GUI: tell the engine to use the UCI protocol uci // ENGINE: identify id name Chess Engine id author John Smith // ENGINE: send the … Read more
How does a chess algorithm work?: What a chess computer tries to do is generate the board-position tree five or 10 or 20 moves into the future. Assuming that there are about 20 possible moves for any board position, a five-level tree contains 3,200,000 board positions. A 10-level tree contains about 10,000,000,000,000 (10 trillion) positions. … Read more
I have spent the last year building my own chess engine in C#. It was not all that difficult. During my work I have made mistakes, I have found that information on the internet was just not presented clearly, and much of it was simply copied from other sites. In order to make life easier … Read more
I actually just wrote a full C# implementation of a chess board, pieces, rules, etc. Here’s roughly how I modeled it (actual implementation removed since I don’t want to take all the fun out of your coding): public enum PieceType { None, Pawn, Knight, Bishop, Rook, Queen, King } public enum PieceColor { White, Black … Read more
From my archives: This is a useful chess programming wiki. This is a simple introduction to chess programming. This is a (free) book on chess algorithms. This contains several easy step-by-step YouTube tutorial series’ ranging from beginner to advanced level. This is a more advanced introduction. This is Adam Berent’s interesting computer chess blog. This … Read more
Update: I liked this topic so much I wrote Programming Puzzles, Chess Positions and Huffman Coding. If you read through this I’ve determined that the only way to store a complete game state is by storing a complete list of moves. Read on for why. So I use a slightly simplified version of the problem … Read more
EDIT: See simon’s answer, where he fixed the formula presented here. Actually there is an O(1) formula This is an image that I’ve made to visualize it ( Squares a knight can reach on Nth move are painted with same color ). Can you notice the pattern here? Although we can see the pattern, it … Read more
This is a technique to encode all directions as arrays – every pair of di[i],dj[i] is a different direction. If we imagine we have a piece at a location x,y, and we want to add onto its x and its y value to move it to a nearby location, 1,0 is east, -1,0 is west, … Read more
“I argued that there could not exist a deterministic Turing machine that always won or stalemated at chess.” You’re not quite right. There can be such a machine. The issue is the hugeness of the state space that it would have to search. It’s finite, it’s just REALLY big. That’s why chess falls back on … Read more