This was my undergraduate A.I. project. Just standard C++ so it compiles with just:
g++ tal.cpp -o tal
It's a Chess engine built to interface with WinBoard. It receives the game state from the GUI, and returns a move for the computer to make.
Looking back, there are obvious places to improve design (move generation is pretty bad/verbose) and I didn't know modern C++. I'm glad that I stumbled on it because the sense of nostalgia is stronk.
Bitboards feel less like a something out of a magician's hat; its just another data structure now (still clever!). And piece square tables are pre-computed Q-values...
I had saved PGNs from various stages of progress. You can kind of see it advance in skill here. The original PGNs (and a few more) are in the repo.
- Early stages (Yay move generation working!)
- I think this was before the Q-values for pieces on particular squares was added. It just does dallies until challenged.
- This next game is from four days later, it think I fixed some bugs with the Alpha Beta search and added piece square tables.
- It managed to find a checkmate because I wasn't paying attention!
- Compile and get the binary
tal - Get WinBoard, and place the engine in its own folder along with the other included engines (should be easy to locate).
- Modify the config file to allow choosing this engine as an option. It's a text file and the list is easy to locate because it includes the names of other engines (whose folder names you see during step 2).
- Start playing and have fun! I would love to hear feedback.
The "official" name is Big /\ Dumb which is what I submitted the project as (refers to source code size + chess playing ability). Other contenders were Tal (after Mikhail Tal), ATK on King and Saphira (Inheritance cycle).