Author: William H Rogers
Date: 11:08:32 06/24/02
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When I first started writting my program, I did not have access to anyones elses coding. I tried to find some to no avail so I just started writing some code. I knew how I wanted to represent my chess board and I knew that some kind of move generator was needed. Not knowing how to put the whole thing together, I decided to write eveything as subroutines with the hopes of tying it all together when I was finished. After writing a move generator for the knight, then the rook and bishop, I decided that I was on a roll. Then when I wrote the move generator for the queen, I stopped. I realized that I was writting the same subroutine over and over again, with only different direcions, etc. I went back and consolidated the whole thing into one move generator using indexes for the directions and number of steps for each piece. By the time I had finished most of the coding, I realized that 90% of the program was done and all I needed was a driver of some sort and that became rather easy. It WORKED! All of my programming was done in 'Basic', but the real challenge is still ahead as most programmers will attest to, and that is slowly improving the playing and strength of the games itself. The most common mistake that I see most beginners make is to try to put the 'cart before the horse', that is, they have access to so many different programs with coding available that they start thinging on how to make it better even before they have a basic model that will play chess to begin with. Even with 'humans' today, we all start off at the bottom of the chess ladder as far as playing strength is concerned and slowly advance to better players, that is why there is a rating system in chess, to mark our progress. So start with a very simple program that plays legal chess, then try to make it better. Bill
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