What it does
Athena uses an advanced minimax algorithm to find the best move to play with a high depth, using alpha/beta pruning to speed up the algorithm and iterative deepening to check the highest depth possible in a limited time. We also wrote an evaluation function based on the PeSTO function to determine which moves were good.
How we built it
We wrote the algorithm in Java, consulting externals sources chessprogramming.org, a big help toward's our knowledge of how a chess engine functions.
What's next for Athena
We are going to rewrite the engine in a different language in the interests of faster results, and implement advanced techniques such as a Principle Variation Search instead of our Minimax search, and utilise PeSTO's evaluation function to it's full potential, as some aspects aren't implemented yet.
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