A Tale of two Chess Programs

Chess has always seemed to me to be one of those things that recreational programmers like to have a go at implementing. For years it was believed that improvements in AI would allow chess programs to beat grand Masters but it was really Moore's law (CPU Processing speed doubles every 18 months) and faster hardware that did it.

if you're tempted to have a go, you could save yourself a lot of effort by using the ChessBin Chess Game Starter Kit. This C# application displays the board and pieces and limits moves to be valid moves. It doesn't however have a Chess Engine, but that's no problem. Just take the C# Micro Chess (aka Huo Chess) which is a C# Micro Chess Engine (< 53Kb in size!) and make the two work together. Both build in the Visual C# 2008 Express though the starter kit gets a little bit antsy with the Starter Kit.

C++ developers should note that there's also a C++ Huo chess as well which you can find on Huo Chess page. I've added both chess programs to the C# Game Code library.

• Link to C# Game Code Library
• Link to Download and Install Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition