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Subject: Re: Chess programming, please help!

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 18:56:02 02/21/03

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On February 21, 2003 at 21:24:52, Pham Ngoc Hai wrote:

> I just received a project from my school. I have to create a chess game, anyone
>please tell me where I should start. I have a little background in programming.
> Thanks for reading.

Go here:
http://brick.bitpit.net/~blik/

Get this if you can read Postscript files:
http://brick.bitpit.net/~marcelk/2002/marcelk-thesis.ps.gz

else, get this:
http://brick.bitpit.net/~marcelk/2002/marcelk-thesis.pdf

It's a lot more ambitious that what you will be doing.

1. Decide on a board structure.  Typical choices are bitboard, 0x88, or mailbox.
 You could just use an 8x8 array, but it won't be as fast as those other choices
I mentioned.
2. Make a move generator.  You will also have to know if a move is legal or not.
3. Make a function to decide who is ahead.  When you are starting out, just
counting who has the most points is probably good enough.  You will improve this
later
4. Write a minimax routine.  When you see how horribly it performs, change to
alpha-beta.  Even though the minimax speed will make you vomit you should do
that first for a few reasons:
A.  Minimax is easy to modify to turn into alpha-beta search.
B.  Since it is simpler, you can get it working a bit easier.
C.  You will be happy to get rid of it when you get Alpha-beta working.
5.  Write a Winboard interface.  It's a bit of a pest, but you won't be sorry,
since it will make it much easier to test.



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