Chess

[ultifinitus]

I sure wish I was any good at chess... I'm playing against my iPod, and losing. consistently. (where consistently is defined as (1))

Strategy is not my strong suit.

@Browni || @Anyone :: Wish to take me up on my offer? I have a 9-5, but I'm free mon-thurs (inclusive) 7:00 - 9:30

(5-7) is currently iPhone dev...

[chrisname]

P(Chris losing chess | against a computer) = 1

[Browni3141]

@ultifinitus: I might be interested, but I haven't done anything with web applications yet. I also haven't done anything with a GUI yet. You might have to do a lot of teaching, but I'm usually a fast learner :)

P.S. I did make a 2-player chess game written in TI-Basic, but I never got around to making AI. Here were some of the features:

1. All pieces were moveable, but it couldn't check legality of moves. Castling would require two moves.
2. Actually, some moves could be checked for legality, but some pieces proved difficult to do so with (pawns/castling)
3. Capturing was enabled, but en passant capturing would have required two moves.
4. Pawns could be promoted (you could select any square and place the piece you wanted)
5. The board could be saved.
6. You could undo one move.
7. You could press a button to display different strings corresponding to "white wins", "black wins" and "draw".

I think that's all I could do. It couldn't check for checkmate or alternate turns. I did successfully play games with my friends on it though.
It was very very messy, this was before I knew real programming languages even existed (only about two years ago). It had about 6,000 lines (A lot of commands were for turning individual pixels on/off).

P.P.S I just got back from Quiz Bowl States at MSU (Michigan State University for those who don't know). We won two games and lost two games in the double elimination tourney.

P.P.P.S I just got one two takers on my offer for a game, I'd still be glad for any others.

[ultifinitus]

@browni: Awesome! I've made a fairly simple chess game (one of my first graphical programs) you can see it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ultifi-chess/files/SDL_Chess4.tar.gz/download

(It's not horrible, it will tell you all valid moves, however there is no castling or en passant. No checkmate check, it would probably take an hour to implement.

If you would like to, I'd be up for teaching you anything you need to know. I have a basic engine that we could use rather successfully for the game.

[blackcoder41]

I also like chess but I'm not good at it either, I wonder why? One of my cousins is very interested in chess and he is good I think. The problem is he hates studying and math stuff. LOL

In our country or should I say city, there are people playing chess at the park. I sometimes watch them play but I just don't get it how they make a move in less than a second WTF!! The timer on the side will almost get wreck because of hitting the stop button.

Can someone explain how these people think???

[chrisname]

Apparently someone like a Grand Master at chess can think around 20 moves ahead, so they pretty much already know what they're going to do before they do it. They try to predict what move you're going to make. I think that's why computers are so good at chess, they can probably predict virtually every possible move.

[Seraphimsan]

Someone wrote:

"Debating with a fundamentalist theist of any kind is like playing chess with a pigeon. You will take your time to calculate the best move possible, and make it. The pigeon will then respond by knocking over the pieces with it's wings, and take a crap on the board. It will then return to it's flock and declare victory over the whole situation"

I don't know, this...this feels relevant. (also I'm not saying all theists are wing flapping, board crapping pigeons...only the ones who know less about their religion than do the non-theists)

Anyways, I used to love chess, until I realized how bad I was at it. As it turns out I wasn't all that bad, but as a young(ish) child (when I played) my father would constantly put my wits to the test (so as to keep them sharpening) and was relentless when I challenged him to any intellectual battle. As a result he kicked my butt left and right at chess. The chess set we had broke, we didn't play again, and by the time we got a new one time had shadowed my memories enough for me to feel that I was a terrible chess player...until about 6 months ago to be honest.

[Browni3141]

blackcoder41 wrote:

Can someone explain how these people think???

A lot of it is pattern recognition. If your playing a very fast game, your basically just drawing from your past experience (at least that's what I do). You do much less calculating than you would in a slower paced game. I beat one of my friends in 1m 10s a couple of days ago. In a game like that I can only calculate short combinations, basically my opponent's response, my next move, and maybe another response.

In slower paced games, pattern recognition plays a huge part as well. It helps you calculate very quickly. Grandmaster games can be very complicated. They're basically fighting over small positional advantages for most of the game, until they can use their advantage to win material or checkmate.

[Browni3141]

I just found an awesome site. I could imagine myself spending an unhealthy amount of time here.
http://gameknot.com/