writing a new chess engine difficult task advice please ;-)

[Jorge Garcia]

Take a look at the blog of mediocre chess engine it's very didactic
http://mediocrechess.blogspot.com/

[Hood]

I'm an amateur compared to most of the people on this board, and I too found it a challenge, so perhaps my experiences as an amateur in overcoming some of the hurdles will benefit you.

Before I try to offer some advice, I have a couple of questions...

Is this your first engine?
Will you be writing your own GUI also?
What language will you use?
How would you grade your overall programing skills?

Thanks for the answer.

1st engine, free accessible GUI, C or Java
skills ?, over 20 years experience in programming.

rgds chris

[Hood]

Writing a Chess engine can be done in a day if you are an experienced engne author, and in a weak if you are an experienced programmer that never wrote a Chess engine before. So I would say it is easy. It is as easy as riding a bike.

Of curse, if you really mean, "but I want to write the strongest engine in the World"... Well, then it is a bit harder, of course. Just like riding a bicycle faster than Lance Armstrong is a tad harder than just riding a bicycle.

Thanks,

may be not the strongest one but strong one for my own use in Freestyle or Correspondence.

rgds
chris

[Hood]

You started just few days ago (after some nonsense hand waving about Cobol)....and now you give up.

Apart from technical skills the most important things in computer chess are determination and patience. Without these I suggest you to just keep posting here and there and forget writing some code

Thanks for warnings .
I think that patience and determination are important not only there.
We are learning on our mistakes.

[Hood]

When I wanted to write a chess program I looked every where for some kind of examples but found none, so Idecided to write one from scratch.
The first thing I did was to create an outline of all the different part needed to in a chess rprogram, ie., borad representation, move generator, evaluation subroutine, legalility verifaction (in-check), Make/unmake piece mover, display borad.
Once these basic things things are done then you can start making it play better hess. I spent a geat amouunt of time working on improving the evaluation suboutine as this helps to determing the real atrenght of the program, well at least in my opinion.
Bill
P.S.
On top of the Wikepedia reference page you might also look up Bruce Morlands reference page as both are great examples for guidance.

Thanks.

[Hood]

Thank you Everyone for help. the suggestions and warnings.

rgds
chris