How hard is it to implement a chess engine? [closed]

Answer 1

Yes, this is definitely within the scope of a student project. Here are some links from my archive to get you started:

• This is a useful chess programming wiki.
• This is a simple introduction to chess programming.
• This is a more advanced introduction.
• This is a good analysis of MTD, a sophisticated search algorithm.
• This is a good guide to validation of move generation.
• This describes the basic architecture of a chess program.
• This is lots of good information on the Dark Thought chess program.
• These are more notes on chess programming.
• A reasonable introduction to rotated bitboards.
• A reasonable introduction to magic bitboards.
• Here is an old report from 2 students who wrote a chess program.
• Finally, here is Wikipedia's take on computer chess.

Answer 2

Crafty is one of the top chess engines and completely open source. However I would discourage you from using it for a student project it's written in C, very complex and very hard to understand because it is highly optimized.

For educational purposes I would recommend taking a look at Adam Berents site where he describes the process he went through when he implemented a chess engine in C#. The source code is available as well of course. It's an excellent point to start from, in my opinion.

Answer 3

A reasonable chess engine on modern PCs is certainly doable, especially if you're old enough to remember there were many Chess programs that used just a few K of memory on 1 and 2 MHz 8-bit machines that could play pretty well. You can whip out a chess engine in an interpreted language nowadays and beat the pants off a top 6502 or Z80 programmer coding his tightest fastest stuff.

I got to work with Dan Spracklen, who did the original Sargon in 1978 with his wife Kathleen. Kathleen's brother did the port to Apple II, and I worked with him and with his son. (At the time I worked with these guys, the chess-for-consumer-profit business was done. I remember one guy who brought out Atari ST and Amiga Chess games and there was really not much market for them by that time.)

"Computer Gamesmanship" is a terrific introduction to chess programming as hobbyists performed it in 1983. It's still a delight to read. Covers the good stuff: alpha-beta, minimax, etc.

It's a good enough book that you can start there and then learn about the advances made since.

Answer 4

I cannot answer on your question, but I can answer to your final comment

"It would be a fun project to have different teams work on chess engines and then let them play against each other ... "

This is already done on FICS chess server. I suggest you to login there (needs telnet) and check the documentation as well, you will probably be able to get in touch with people able to give you specific hints on their chessbots

Answer 5

We did a mancala AI followed by a chess AI in Algorithms and Data Structures (sophomore CS).

However, the professor provided big chunks of the chess engine, and we had to do things like improve the decision function, implement checkmate, and other things.

Answer 6

Every year at my university, the Introduction to AI course (3rd year course) requires students to create a chess program from scratch along with a paper, and we covered a chapter about adversarial search in lecture so that students have enough knowledge to do it. For us, the project can be done either on our own or with another (obviously expecting a better program if done with a partner, such as deeper ply, etc.). Because the Computer Graphics course is also a 3rd year course, students are allowed to combine the final project of that with the final project of the AI course.

Since I happen to be in my 3rd year and am taking both courses (which have now ended with the first semester), I teamed up with a friend who's also in both courses and we've been working on the program since the end of our exams (which was around Dec. 21) and it's due on Jan. 11.

It's completely doable within a month (especially as a graduate project). We're making a 3d chess program thus it requires more work than just a chess engine of course. The hardest parts will be deciding on a board representation, implementing all the rules (en passant, castling, promotion, etc.), creating a heuristic function, and the game tree (which is usually done with alpha-beta pruning).

Here is the site which we're using to document progress, and later host the code and the paper once we're done (it's a bit empty right now). http://sites.google.com/site/chessatbrock/