Creating a Chess Engine From Scratch

Abstract

The goal of this project was to create a complete chess engine that stores the board state, explores possible moves, uses heuristics to efficiently calculate the best moves, and interacts with a GUI to provide a playable experience for users. Following this, different heuristics could then be compared to better understand which had the greatest reduction in search space from the same engine employing no heuristics. Additionally, this project sought to find combinations of different heuristics that complement each other or may work better together than individually. Ideally, the chess engine should be able to quickly update board state to allow for heuristics to be explored when the engine is searching at greater depths. To achieve this, the chess engine created through this project was designed to update the board state and make moves as quickly as possible, without much concern for memory used.