Queen's Gambit

home page for the web app
chess board
game end detected
evaluating best possible move for the AI to make
function to check when pawn has been promoted

Inspiration

We have always been interested but lousy at playing chess. However, after entering computing and learning the various algorithms such as Minimax, we were inspired and thought, we might not be able to beat others at chess but we can certainly try to make something that can.

What it does

Our chess application allows users to player online-multiplayer or against our very own AI!

How we built it

We chose to use the create-react-app boilerplate to minimise setup and invest more time in diving into weird technological rabbit holes, to make the most out of this project.

We also decided to implement the minimax algorithm to support the AI feature for the application, and optimised it using various weights for the chess pieces based on their relative positions on the board.

Made use of the chess javascript library which we use to validate chess moves and check/checkmate detection.

Made use of socket.io for communication between the player and the server.

Challenges we ran into

We had to delay the time taken for the AI to make a move to avoid overworking the processor. This has improved performance significantly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the first project that all of us did, in which no one knew each other. We were proud of the fact that everyone worked together and managed to produce a working product.