Inspiration
Our inspiration for making a chess engine was our love of chess. We have always admired how strong computers are at playing chess, so we figured we would try to program an engine!
What it does
Our chess bot will play a game of chess against you in a user-friendly graphical interface.
How we built it
We built the engine from the ground up, starting with move validation to make sure the bot plays legal moves, all the way through increasing recursion depth to help the bot come up with better moves.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenges were getting the bot to learn how to make better moves, and getting our GUI to integrate with the actual engine.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we created a working chess engine that will finish a game of chess every time, (as long as the human player plays legal moves) and watching the engine improve as we tweaked the evaluation method.
What we learned
We learned how to implement GUIs into a Java project, how to use build tools such as Maven to help us with GitHub repositories, and how recursive trees are useful for performing searches.
What's next for Zoo Chess
Zoo chess plans to continue improving the evaluation function to become more efficient, and therefore be able to run at a larger recursion depth in a timely manner. This means that the engine will start to be able to play better moves.
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