Day 1

03/27/21

Last night, while trying to sleep, the idea for a chess engine wormed into my thoughts. So here I am, making that dream a reality… for the third time. Only this time, the plan is to actually release it instead of letting it rot away on my computer. For fun, I’ve decided to add these blog pages with development musings/commentary along the way.

Why Now?

While thinking of what projects to do using .NET MAUI, I remembered old college chess projects. I just simply forgot about them once I got a job. A shame really, because I had a working app in Java with AI. Used to have AI chess matches with fellow programmers. Fun times.

Then & Now

My first chess engine was squashed into a single Java file and worked via console. When I added a user interface, I broke it up but most of the behavior remained the same. It was the typical bit board implementation, fast but just as messy as any other. I had plans to make a third version, leveraging object-oriented principles instead. That never happened.

Today I plan to revisit that idea, and make a cleanly designed piece of chess software. And so it starts…