48 Hour Chess

Program by Mike Robinson This program doesn't play well but it's claim to fame is that it was written in a weekend. Admitidly a weekend without much sleep. It started out with an idea of data driving the whole move generation process. After a couple of hours it was printing all the valid moves on the board. I soon got it to pick a random move and then swap sides and at this point it was playing chess (very bad chess). I added a simple scoring routine and suddenly it was playing better, not brilliant, but better. By Sunday night I'd turned it into an applet, found some chess piece images to use and released it. Viola, 48 Hour chess! The program doesn't play well for obvious reasons. It also doesn't allow en passant, it often gets confused over when it can castle and pawns can only be promoted into queens. That withstanding, I'm still very proud of the program. If you're interested and want to have a look at the program then it's here in a zip file. This program later became Fun Chess which plays a lot better.