pdchess1

pdchess1 : Portable Didactic Chess, incarnation number 1.

A rudimentary chess application with a command-line interface.

Building pdchess1

gcc must be present in order to build the project.

If make is present, it can be used to help build the project:

$ make
$ ./pdchess

If make is absent, the project can be built using gcc alone:

$ ./build.sh
$ ./pdchess

Playing pdchess1

A fairly standard command syntax is used to specify moves; e.g.:

• e2 e4 : An initial pawn move by White
• g8 f6 : An initial knight move by Black
• O-O : Castle on the kingside

• O-O-O : Castle on the queenside

• :? : Help

• :q : Quit

Example

The beginning of a sample run involving the Sicilian Defence:

Game or study? (g/s): g
White: human or computer (h/c): h
Black: human or computer (h/c): c
Max search depth for Black (1-25): 5
Extended max search depth for Black (5-25): 5
Resign threshold (3-100): 10
rnbqkbnr
pppppppp
-+-+-+-+
+-+-+-+-
-+-+-+-+
+-+-+-+-
PPPPPPPP
RNBQKBNR
Move #1
White: e2 e4
Matching move in book...
rnbqkbnr
pppppppp
-+-+-+-+
+-+-+-+-
-+-+P+-+
+-+-+-+-
PPPP-PPP
RNBQKBNR
Move #1
Black: Working...
Using opening book...
Black: c7 c5
rnbqkbnr
pp+ppppp
-+-+-+-+
+-p-+-+-
-+-+P+-+
+-+-+-+-
PPPP-PPP
RNBQKBNR
Move #2
White: ...

History

• I witnessed the University of Waterloo host a tournament of Othello (Reversi)-playing programs in 1992; these programs played each other by sending game data over the Internet.
• After creating my own rudimentary Othello-playing program in C, I chose chess as the next problem domain to tackle. The result was incarnation number 1 of pdchess, which was written in C in 1993. I began the project during my university exams in April. This version had a console interface. I started developing it on the univerity’s Unix computers, then e-mailed the source code to my e-mail address at Digital Equipment of Canada in Ottawa, where I worked during the summer of 1993. At Digital, I ported the code to compile and run on the VAX/VMS operating system, and I continued development. In August 1993, I e-mailed the source code back to Waterloo. Just before finishing my final term in April 1994, I copied the source code to a 3.5-inch floppy and took it with me.
• During the summer of 1994, I modified the code to work on my brand-new computer (an Intel 80486SX PC clone running Windows 3.1, with 640 KB + 3072 KB of RAM and a 360 MB hard drive, plus 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch floppy drives) via Borland Turbo C++ 3.1. I created a GUI for pdchess using Turbo C++’s OWL (Object Windows Library) framework. (OWL was analogous to Microsoft’s MFC.)
• Incarnation number 2 of pdchess was written in C++ in 2002, after I had read Bjarne Stroustrup’s book on the language.
• Incarnation number 3 of pdchess was written in Typescript in Beijing, China in February and March 2020, during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
• pdchess is also known to some as ‘partly done chess’. :-)

License

MIT