Author: Roberto Waldteufel
Date: 23:51:34 08/02/98
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On August 02, 1998 at 19:29:15, Jeff Anderson wrote: >I am a sixteen yearold novice programmer. I am looking for a chess >program written in Visual Basic with the code available, since I am such a >begginner, it is one of the only programming languages I would be able to >understand. I know there are lots of programs on the >internet with the code available, but they are all written in real >programming languages like C, and not toy ones that I can understand. I know >that since VB is so slow, it wouldn't be especially strong, but it would still >give me a good understanding of how a chess program works. >So if anyone could send me one, or direct me to one, I would be >grateful. >Thanks, >Jeff Hi Jeff, I also write programs in a "toy language", ie Basic. I have programmed in Basic for many years now, and if you like and are familiar with Basic there is no need to learn C if you don't want to. The best Basic compilers I have found are by PowerBasic in Carmel, California. If your computer runs 32-bit Windows, eg Win95, Win98 or Win NT, then I would recommend either PBCC (Power Basic Console Compiler) for Console (text screen) or PBDLL, which compiles 32-bit Windows DLL's. Personally I prefer PBCC because the input/output is much simpler to program, very similar to DOS based Basic with statements like print, lprint, input, input$ etc. Both these compilers will produce code about 10-20 times faster than VB. If you like the fancy GUI features of VB, you can program your interface with VB and your time-critical search code in Power Basic for speed. I don't know of any good source code in Basic for you to look at. As you know, most code is written in C, but there is plenty of information about algorithms and so on around - once you understand what you want the code to do, it's not usually too difficult to write your code in Basic. You might find it interesting to browse some of the sources available on the net. Try Aske Plaat's Web site, for example, for some good information about alpha beta algorithm variants, especially MTD. He also deals with hashing very well. Good luck, Roberto
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