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Subject: Quite interesting and could prove useful

Author: ludicrous

Date: 18:58:37 07/12/05


As the readme file states, the Lime engine's programmer managed to create a
decent chess playing program within a period of 12 months with no programming
experience prior!

Such a feat is an accomplishment.  Perhaps the author of Lime can share with the
community the steps he undertook to accomplish this?


=====================
Lime Readme file

Lime is a weak chess engine, created over a period of 12 months. In Jan 2004, I
decided,
as a keen chess player, that I would like to have my own chess engine. These
thoughts were
also motivated by my interest in running tournaments with the other amateur
engines out there.

After a few weeks of research, it became clear that there is a whole community
worldwide
devoted to chess programming, with some great tournament sites for winboard
engines.

The problem was that I had no programming experience!

I bought some books (Accelerated C++ and Beginning Game Programming with C++
were the best
of these) and started to program. In June 2004, I had a buggy program that sort
of worked.
It used vectors for storing moves, and references in the move generation code.
It was very,
very slow, and crashed a lot. It was also 5000 lines, and did not contain
structures or classes.

I was a little disheartened at this point, and quit for two months. In October
2004, I re-opened
the books, learnt about pointers and structures, and created a shorter, faster
program. It is
currently playing on the ICC under the handle “xiphosura”.

You will need an interface to play with this engine – Winboard or Arena.

================



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