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

Author: Rafael Andrist

Date: 11:57:29 08/29/01

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On August 29, 2001 at 13:12:37, Roy Eassa wrote:

>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"?

The main element of a chess program on a low level is the move generator.
Programming this may need some hours (if you already did it once). In some
minutes you can add a simple full-width alpha-beta-search (without hash access
etc.) Then you write a simple evaluation function, only including material
values and some easy positional stuff, without pawn structure evaluation. If you
develop under Visual Basic, the GUI also doesn't need much time. Of course, for
a nice GUI you need also 1 or 2 days.

Rafael B. Andrist



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