Chess Engine Day 1 Recap

Recap:

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Each day I work on this project I want to provide a little snapshot of my progress. Eventually I'll maybe start recording videos but it's hard at school with a roommate.

Find the code for my Day 1 commit here

Brief Documentation:

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Today I got started with two classes, ChessGame and ChessMove.

ChessMove – A pydantic BaseModel I use to parse algebraic notation for chess moves into information I can use/store.

• I'm not entirely sure how useful this will be, but I know I will need it to some degree.
• Searches chess notation moves for the move number, the piece, square, check/mate, ...
• Init function just accepts the move notation and the color that moved
• Allows my board abstraction in ChessGame to interface with the notation

ChessGame – Stores all of the data for an individual game

• A board is initialized as a 2d numpy array with different int for the pieces. Black is negative.
• Store a history of the moves as an array of ChessMove objects
• Keeps status of checking rights on both sides
• I created function declarations for move validation but they aren't done at all yet

main – used for testing pretty much today

Thoughts:

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I'm happy with my progress so far. As I develop, I'm keeping the idea of scaling this to an actual api in the back of my mind. It's important that everything is modular and clean; logic needs to be separated wherever possible. I think the logic for parsing chess notation into data I can use will prove super useful.

The core functionality for the game that I really need seems to be:

• Move validation
• Board storage
• Notation parsing

Once those are complete, I will have an intereface for chess games that the computer should be able to understand. That's my first goal, and we can go for there.