Best game

Oscar Toledo G.

Familia Toledo 

  Av. Santa Cruz del Monte 9-304
  Ciudad Satelite Edo de Mexico
  CP 53110
  Mexico
  uno@biyubi.com

Contents


Judges' comments


Improved versions

Better mate searching

toledo2.c

Better castling checking

toledo3.c


To build

  cc toledo.c -o toledo

To run

For two human players 

  toledo

To play against the program 

  toledo a

Author's comments


What does this program

This is a chess program, it can work in two modes: two-players, and one player (always white) against the machine. To get the first mode, run the program without arguments: 

     prog

The other mode is accesible running the program with one argument (5-ply analysis): 

     prog a

Two arguments for 6-ply analysis: 

     prog a b

And each succesive argument will analyze one ply more. There is no ply limit, but beyond 7 ply is very slow, try it at your own risk and computing time.


Entering movements

When is your turn, you can enter your move, by example, as "d2d4" (without the quotes) and press the Enter key, the computer will check move legality and will warn you of illegal moves. All legal chess moves are permitted.

One special case is when you are doing promotion, you must enter the move with an extra letter indicating the desired piece.

By example "f7f8n" (supossing you have a pawn on f7), will promote it to a knight, substitute 'n' for the desired piece (N/Q/R/B).

Note that the program requires the piece letter, it will not select automatically a queen, so don't be surprised if it doesn't accept your move.


Game status

The computer will check for checkmate and stalemate, also after each machine move, it will show the score of the position, an higher number is better for the computer, i.e. worst for you.


Quirks

None.


Program operation

This is a good example of a chess program reduced to the essential. In order to get it into the contest limits, I used short but slow and unintelligible algorithms.

The interface accounts for only a fraction of the code, the core does multiples functions, it is called recursively to analyze and evaluate each ply, does alpha-beta cutting, move generation, machine playing, check detection, illegal move verification and does moves after they are verified.

Also sets an standard on ultra-mini-chess programs, the player and the computer can do all legal chess moves, other features are:

  • Illegal move verification.
  • Checkmate detection.
  • Stalemate detection.
  • Computer is tough (check 7-ply), even in 5 ply can give a surprise to amateur players.

Obsfucation tricks

  • Only one C function, really modular.
  • Extensive use of the trinary and comma operators, save a hard drive today.
  • Extensive use of C operator precedence, all good C programmers remember it... I cannot.
  • Exchanged operands every place is possible, someday someone will understand it,
  • Mixed and multifunction expressions on statements, in good old-BASIC style.
  • Macros used to hide C syntax, check unballanced parenthesis and calls with empty arguments!
  • Only includes strictly necessary standard headers, the linker takes care, and compiles faster... but I'm still not seeing the difference.
  • Uses only one string, very easy to I18N ;)