A tribute to chess programming community

[maksimKorzh]

Hi, guys!

The chess programming community gave me so much for the last three years
and now I'd like to give it something back. I couldn't write a strong chess
program so far and won't do that probably ever for many reasons, so I've chosen
a different approach - minimalist chess. Being inspired by Bluefever's Software
VICE(video internet chess engine) video series I decided to create my own, much
shorter one, targeting the very beginners. So for those of you who has already
written 1800+ ELO rated engine this series is not going to be interesting, but
for those who has never tried chess programming before and is looking for some
easy way to jump right in this series might be interesting.

I've written a very primitive chess program called "bare minimum chess program"
and made a some sort of the video tutorial explaining how it works. It is intended
to those who already knows how to code in C but didn't try to write a chess program yet.

The source code is based on the ideas taken from the great micro-Max engine
by H.G. Muller, who has spent quite a several pages at technical discussion
thread in order to explain to me how particularly his program works.

So a deep bow to you, Mr.Muller!

full source code: https://github.com/maksimKorzh/bmcp
YouTube tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... pxazkGoh16

[Dann Corbit]

I would skip the unicode output and just print a text representation.

Code: Select all

bmcp-commented.c(136) : warning C4566: character represented by universal-character-name '\u265F' cannot be represented in the current code page (1252)
bmcp-commented.c(136) : warning C4566: character represented by universal-character-name '\u265A' cannot be represented in the current code page (1252)
bmcp-commented.c(136) : warning C4566: character represented by universal-character-name '\u265E' cannot be represented in the current code page (1252)
bmcp-commented.c(136) : warning C4566: character represented by universal-character-name '\u265D' cannot be represented in the current code page (1252)
bmcp-commented.c(136) : warning C4566: character represented by universal-character-name '\u265C' cannot be represented in the current code page (1252)
bmcp-commented.c(136) : warning C4566: character represented by universal-character-name '\u265B' cannot be represented in the current code page (1252)
bmcp-commented.c(137) : warning C4566: character represented by universal-character-name '\u2659' cannot be represented in the current code page (1252)
bmcp-commented.c(137) : warning C4566: character represented by universal-character-name '\u2654' cannot be represented in the current code page (1252)
bmcp-commented.c(137) : warning C4566: character represented by universal-character-name '\u2658' cannot be represented in the current code page (1252)
bmcp-commented.c(137) : warning C4566: character represented by universal-character-name '\u2657' cannot be represented in the current code page (1252)
bmcp-commented.c(137) : warning C4566: character represented by universal-character-name '\u2656' cannot be represented in the current code page (1252)
bmcp-commented.c(137) : warning C4566: character represented by universal-character-name '\u2655' cannot be represented in the current code page (1252)

[maksimKorzh]

Text representation is also available, thanks for your feedback, Dann. Just uncomment the pieces[] = ",-pknrbkq-P-KNBRQ" array and the corresponding line in PrintBoard() function.

To make it look like this:

Code: Select all

void PrintBoard()
{
    for(int sq = 0; sq < 128; sq++)
    {
        if(!(sq % 16)) printf(" %d  ", 8 - (sq / 16));    // print ranks to the left of the board
        printf(" %c", ((sq & 8) && (sq += 7)) ? '\n' : pieces[board[sq] & 15]);    // ASCII pieces
        //printf(" %s", ((sq & 8) && (sq += 7)) ? "\n" : pieces[board[sq] & 15]);    // unicode pieces
    }
    
    printf("\n     a b c d e f g h\n\nYour move: \n");
}