Game of chess has been a classic AI problem and these days there are several excellent open source implementations of automatic chess players are available on line. In this assignment we are going to make yet another FAST-chess player that will play chess using some well-established strategies along with MINIMAX to compute moves for a chess player.
To complete this assignment you have been provided with an abstract base class called chessPlayer and two demo player classes named humanPlayer and autoPlayer. Along with these two class, another class, called gameState, is also provided that holds state of the game at any given time. The state of the chess at any given time consists of information about player turn (i.e. an enumeration called Color with a value of 1 means WHITE player will move and 0 means BLACK player will move) and an 8 x 8 chess board with chess pieces encoded as shown below.
The negative numbers represent pieces of Black player and positive numbers represent pieces of Whiteplayer
For your convenience, all major functions for playing chess are already implemented and the chess state also includes a list of valid moves available at any given time.
Your primary job in this assignment is to create an auto-player named YOUR_GROUP_NAME (the name of your group be used to name the class). Your class will inherit the abstract base class chessPlayer and will provide an overridden implementation the virtual function decideMove . To give you an idea, a sample autoPlayer is also provided along with a deriver program. This auto-player selects a move at random from a set of available moves. Try to play with the auto player and enjoy your game.
Your implementation must use alpha-beta pruning and a max-depth parameter to specify the maximum depth of the tree to be used for making a single move. Indeed this would require an implementation of the evaluation function as well. [3 Marks].
Marks will be awarded for
- a detailed review of available Evaluation Functions (You must submit a report explaining various evaluation functions already available)
- a detailed description of your own evaluation function
- correct implementation of your auto player
- ranking of your player w.r.t the remaining students(Tentative)
Please remember that you are not allowed to modify the existing classes and must provide only your own auto-player class that must be a child of the abstract chessPlayer class. You are free to define your own class structure as you desire.
If a change is needed in the base code, you can post your suggestion on google classroom stream and it will be considered
Further submission guidelines will be provided as we progress.
The base code has been written using CODEBLOCKS and you might have to re-arrange it to port it to other development environments like Visual Studios