Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: These days anybody can write a chess program.Johan de Koning [interview]

Author: Roy Eassa

Date: 10:12:37 08/29/01

Go up one level in this thread


On August 29, 2001 at 08:06:26, Adam Oellermann wrote:

>He's right, too. Some of my colleagues are interested in my chess program, but
>when I suggested they write their own, they said it was beyond them. To prove a
>point, I hacked together some ugly VB which plays chess. It doesn't play at all
>well, but was put together in an evening while watching TV without any reference
>to any other source code. Given the accessibility of VB, I guess this means that
>literally nearly anybody can write a chess program. There is a relatively strong
>chess engine implemented in VB (LarsenVB), and even a Perl chess engine (not
>very strong, but that's not the point). This stuff is becoming more and more
>accessible, and I think it's great.
>
>On the other hand, writing a *strong* chess program seems a little trickier.
>


I must say, I'm an experienced programmer and chess enthusiast who has never
attempted to write a chess program for fear of the massive time/focus involved.
To hear that you wrote one in VB that plays legal chess, IN ONE EVENING, blows
my mind.  What was the user interface?  Did it understand en passant captures
and all the legalities of castling?  Did it do alpha-beta pruning?  Had you
written so many chess programs previously that doing it again was "old hat"?



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.