Claude Shannon Paper

I read the paper 'Programming a Computer for Playing Chess' by Claude Shannon (1949). I thought it would be difficult to read, but it was fine, and certainly very useful from a theory point of view. It's remarkable how relevant most of it is today, more than 60 years later.

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Move Generation

Move generation is sorted, apart from special cases like castling, en passant and not allowing moves in to check. I have to be careful with them, they're rare cases so if I implement them badly, they'll slow the search down with next to no gain. Here are some pictures with green squares illustrated available moves for a certain piece:

New Pieces Icons

I've found some good looking icons to replace my horrible home made icons for the chess pieces.

Look how pretty they are:

Icons are from Clker, which are all public domain images.

First Version of Something

I finally got round to making an actual thing:

All it does so far is let the user place pieces and remove them ( all the pieces are included, not just white queens).

It can be quite difficult to make this, because you have to be very forward thinking. You don't want to implement a clumsy mechanism early on because it'll probably make things so much harder later on in the project.

The next thing to do is move generation, which I'll then test thoroughly for as many different configurations as I can be bothered to do. If I can implement it successfully, I may use Perft, which is an algorithm designed to test the move generation system.

After that, I'll make sure the whole thing is optimized as much as reasonably possible, and everything is done probably (as in, no messy short cuts that may cause problems in the future).