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

Answer 1

All depend of the goal that you fix about the AI of the game ! if it's a 2 players game.. easy ! But the AI is quite hard ...Right, the well know open source is GNU Chess !

Some algorithms : http://www.vclcomponents.com/s/0__/source_code_genetic_algorithm_chess
Here is a chess programming wiki !

Answer 2

I have spent the last year building my own chess engine in C#. It was not all that difficult. During my work I have made mistakes, I have found that information on the internet was just not presented clearly, and much of it was simply copied from other sites.

In order to make life easier for someone else going through this process, I have been documenting the development of my chess engine and posted much of the source code on my blog:

http://www.chessbin.com

I have even created a Chess Game Development Kit that will get you started in developing your own chess engine, which contains:

1. All the code necessary to represent a chess board and chess pieces
2. Code related to validating chess piece movement
3. Graphical User Interface that displays the chess position and allows you to move pieces around the board

My site is basically dedicated for people just like you; people that want to get started on building their own chess engine.

Answer 3

To make a good one is hard, but probably at about the right level for a graduate project (when I took my batchelor's in Computer Science, a friend of mine wrote a chess engine for his final year dissertation).

And yes there are Open Source ones, the leading contender being GNU Chess, which is very well respected.

Answer 4

This is probably too simple, but still, interesting lessons to be learned: I present to you the ZX81 Chess game

Answer 5

In my undergrad AI course we spent half a semester creating various chess engines and testing them out using XBoard or WinBoard. Then at the end of the semester we had a tournament where the student's chess engines competed with each other in XBoard. Overall it worked out pretty well.

Interfacing to XBoard is fairly easy if I recall correctly. Here are some links.

http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/

interface for XBoard

http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard/engine-intf.html

I'm not sure if this gets you everything you want, I think our chess engines had to create their own board representations and come up with moves on their own, but at least it gets you a graphical board that knows the rules and has a GUI.

Answer 6

It depends on the strength level you are targeting and your programming skills. Assuming you area an experienced programmer, here's my opinion (i know lots of engines, but never coded one):

*A very simple engine, that can beat an beginner/amateur(ELO 1200-1600): lots of code, but easy.

*A engine, that can beat a 'club player' (ELO 1800-2000): it starts to get hard, you'll need opening books, optimizations and a solid AI

*A engine that can beat a master: hard, you'll need some years of previous experience

*A top engine (like Rybka, Houdini, Stockfish, Hiarcs), that can beat any human being on earth 99% of time: this is a tremendous effort, you'll need a LOT of patience and years of experience.

That's how i see it!