Programming a chess engine

Anyone ever tried to make a chess-playing engine?

I'm comtemplating creating one myself and I've been reading up on the topic for a while. So far it seems like I'll want to get myself familiarized with bitboards and move searching methods like Negamax and alpha-beta.

I'm also trying to decide which language to make it in. I am experienced in Visual Basic and I'm *familiar* with C++ (that means I haven't used it nearly as much as VB). I think I'm confident enough in both languages to create an engine. But speed is the big thing here. Are C++ applications way faster, or is there only a small difference?

Well anyways if any of you have made one before feel free to post your experiences; what you found useful and what to avoid.

If I finish (I've been known to abandon projects like this in the middle but I'll try to persevere on this one) I will post the source code in the Code Review section of AO for all to see.

Talk to you later :D
mjk

Can't help you, but why is speed an issue for a chess game? :D

Quote:

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why is speed an issue for a chess game?

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Well you want the engine to be able to calculate moves as fast as possible so that it can search up to a good depth in a reasonable time. If it took a week to search to 5 ply, it wouldn't be a very good chess program now, would it? :D

Anyone got something else to throw at me? Any feedback welcome ;)

mjk

I won't be of much help here either... but,

Why not go to somewhere like http://sourceforge.net/search/ and search for chess.

They will have plenty of info on projects just like this. You could look at others' source code, or contact people with experience writing a program such as this. You're almost guaranteed to find someone who knows what they're talking about, rather than hoping for suggestions here.