Long after the thrill...

I'd like to say that it was a good night. The problems just don't stop popping up. They just don't! Sticking with my plan of solid basics, I've been trying to get it to mate. It's a critical piece of the game, and without it you really can't win. If it's a forced mate in one... no problem. But give it a chance, and it will take it's time. That means that it will never mate. It saw a forced mate in 4 or 5 moves and decided to just keep hopping back and forth between 2 squares instead of playing the mating line. That's because every time it moves, it sees it can mate in X and isn't always picking the best line. Isn't always means pretty much never. That's unacceptable.

Where I'm at now is that if I can get the mate to work, that's enough to demo. It will have the wow - that looks nice affect. Or is that effect? Hmm... confusing at the moment. But being able to show the program calculate a mate in 7, 8, 9... or something like that would be pretty neat to see I think. Then I can just deal with the opening book/transposition tables, some positional knowledge, and a few other extras along with my paper before next Thursday.

The big thing for tomorrow is the presentation. Here are the potential slides I've come up with so far to design:

Module Flow (show the modules used in the program and how they interact)
Command Reference (what commands are supported by the engine)
Minimax Diagram and Example
AlphaBeta Diagram and Example
Project Goals and what's been reached
Chess Rules and Rules supported by the engine
Notable References used in creating the program
Bitboards (maybe... already went over in 1st presentation)
Transposition Tables and what they are used for
Quiescent Search (maybe... since I still haven't worked more on it)
The current field of chess programs/research
Performance statistics

That and the demo should more than take care of the 15-30 minutes we are each given for our presentation. In fact, I'll have to rush very quickly to make it... so in the end I can probably leave a little out. But thinking it through ahead of time will make it easier tomorrow to actually put it all together.

So is 2am, so I'm going to get to bed.

Wish me luck tomorrow. Much to do!

Ed.