The code was a mess, and the program was slow af, but it was an amazing learning experience.
that’s a cool project :)
did you also build the machine learning component from scratch? like hand-built graph structures, autodiff, policy, reward functions etc?
Ohh and when I said that I shouldn’t have used my own solutions, I was talking about the way I handled computing legal moves, checking for “Checks”, and even the way I coded the board.
A week before the deadline, I lost hope of making it any faster by myself, so I started searching for how other people did it, and I saw a ton of great optimization tricks that would require me to rewrite a huge chuck of the code, as it changes the underlying mechanics, so I couldn’t use them.
I didn’t search before not out of laziness, but of stubbornness, insisting that I can figure it out on my own. Lesson learning the hard way.
Yeah I wrote a chess game before and calculating legal moves was a nightmare. Especially with knights, castling, and en passant and other obscure rules. And I did not write that very cleanly, I think I had 1700 lines of code in that file.
No machine learning. The AI is basically 2 functions:
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A function that determines the score of the position. A positive score is good for white, a negative one is for black. To do that, the function takes into consideration the number/value of pieces on the board, the position of the pieces(Knight in the center is worth more than a knight on the edge for example), and the safety of the king.
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Based on this score, I used Minimax to look multiple moves ahead, and determine the best outcome. Anything more than depth 3 makes the program take forever to compute though.
heh, that’s an… untraditional approach to chess algorithms :)
i’m very curious what the elo score for such an algorithm would be? have you tried to pair it against another bot to measure the score?
It’s actually not. Minimax has been used lots of times for chess AI in the past. There are probably better techniques that are used these days though.
Edit: when you search chess ai on YouTube, the top three videos are tutorials that use minimax, each with over a million views
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This was extremely hard, and like my advisor said, out of scope for me. The code was a mess, and the algorithm was extremely slow, but it worked. In hindsight, I could’ve done a lot a better if I didn’t insist on coming up with my own solution. I did end up getting an “A” though, and Godot was a pleasure to work with, simply because it didn’t get in the way. It allowed me to make a pretty GUI easily, and focus on writing algorithms.
Wouldn’t recommend working on a project like this for your BS degree, unless you have a lot of free time to work on it, and very comfortable working with a lot data structures.
