Contents  Games of Perfect  Information  What We Need  Board  Representations  Move Generation  Search Techniques  Evaluation  Printable version     The Series  Getting Started  Data Structures  Move Generation  Basic Search  Advanced Search  Evaluation  Functions

What We Need

In order to play chess, a computer needs a certain number of software components.  At the very least, these include:

• Some way to represent a chess board in memory, so that it knows what the state of the game is.
• Rules to determine how to generate legal moves, so that it can play without cheating (and verify that its human opponent is not trying to pull a fast one on it!)
• A technique to choose the move to make amongst all legal possibilities, so that it can choose a move instead of being forced to pick one at random.
• A way to compare moves and positions, so that it makes intelligent choices.
• Some sort of user interface.

This series will cover all of the above, except the user interface, which is essentially a 2D game like any other.  The rest of this article describes the major issues related to each component and introduces some of the concepts to be explored in the series.

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