Getting started

I'm starting this blog to document the steps for creating my own engine. I kicked off this project in December 2009 and dedicate since then a part of my spare time to it. I always liked programming and as a student I created Checkers and Othello engines just for fun. Chess I considered to difficult in regards of the ability of hardware back then and my favor for more complex programming languages like Pascal or C instead of Assembler.

Now hardware is much more powerful and I guessed probably powerful enough to allow me to create an engine that plays a decent game of chess. So I started this project. I decided to use Free Pascal for it. Most of the engines out there are written in C or C++ but I wanted I nice little GUI too. For that I always liked Delphi but I only have a 16 bit version of it available (Delphi 1.0) which is not suitable for that purpose and I didn't want to invest into a current version for my fun project either, so I took Free Pascal (Lazarus).

The first version of my engine was no engine at all. It was a GUI able to play chess. It did not use any protocol as I was not aware that something like chess protocols exist.

It used an array structure of 12x12 as board representation (12x12 not 8x8 as I thought it might be easier to implement an "off the board" detection when I place 2 rings of invalid squares around the 8x8 board and do not generate a move when the target square is a invalid square). Moves where generated by looping through all the pieces and jumping, moving or sliding them until they hit a piece or invalid square. It worked by it was awfully slow.

To generate the 119.060.324 nodes that are 6 half moves (plys) deep from the initial position it took 96 sec. For search it used a plain Alpha-Beta Mini-Max algorithm with a short quiescence search (stops after 4 plys). This version was able to calculate 4-5 plys deep to get a move in a reasonable amount of time, which is enough to play not a totally stupid game of chess but not good enough to satisfy me.

I decided to start the project all over again and doing some research first. I decided to use only some of the old user interface code for the new GUI and create a real engine as standalone executable using those things I leaned while doing my chess engine programming research.