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COMP 4801

Final Year Project

Interim Report

Chess Making Engine - Chreator

A convenient tool for making or designing any chess

type you would like to have

Supervisor

Dr. KP Chan

Groupmate

Fung Wai Him 3035074971 Li Chun Kit 3035074311

20th Jan, 2016

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Table of content

Summary 3

Background and Introduction 4

Objectives 5

Program Structure

General architecture

GUI

Chess playing Program

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Development progress 13

Conclusion 14

Figure List 1a. Screenshot of aihorizon.com. Tutorials on AI implementation

1b. Screenshot of XiangQi Wizard

2. General architecture of Chreator

3. “Chessboard” tab in operation

4. General program flow of Chreator GUI

5a. Chess playing program (Western Chess) without Debug mode

5b. Chess playing program (Xiang Qi) with Debug mode ON

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Summary

Artificial intelligent (AI) develops rapidly and more students participate in the

learning process. Learning materials available are either purely algorithms or

completed Chess game programs. This paper introduces our product for easily making

and designing Chess Games - Chreator, which can produce a basic framework of

chess games easily. We hope Chreator could assist facilitating the development of AI

evaluation functions and implementation. Furthermore, it could help people with

fewer programming knowledge and resources to enjoy the happiness of making their

own chess games.

Until now, all user interfaces of chess game executable have been implemented. Users

can now use the Chreator to quickly setup the chess board by simply providing a

picture and by clicking, dragging and dropping to specify its size, position and so on.

As for the chess game executable, functions in the library work properly and can

provide designated features to facilitate the movement of pieces and AI

implementation. Chess pieces access, movement, removal, chess board virtualization,

game tree applications can be done with simple function calls. The chess playing part

can be operated normally. General chess games’ features, especially undo function,

are usually functioning without modifying any code.

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Background and Introduction

Artificial intelligent (AI) develops rapidly and acts a more important role nowadays.

AI can be used for single player gaming AI implementation, result prediction,

situation virtualization and decision making. As a result, learning and improving the

implementation of AI becomes a topic being concerned.

For an AI beginner to start with, Chess game implementation is straightforward, easy

and classical study case to work on. There are simple chess game making tutorials and

chess game software available. Examples are aihorizon.com and XiangQi Wizard

respectively. The first one provides step by step instructions of code implementation

and code header files for building the whole chess game including chess board, chess

piece, AI, data structure and other corresponding components, which are usually not

the concerns of an AI developer. The second one provides an executable with AI

thinking steps illustrated. This kind of game executable provides only limited chess

types and unmodifiable AI implementation, although the difficulty of the AI can be

selected.

Fig.1a: Screenshot of aihorizon.com. Tutorials

on AI implementation. Working principles and

template header code for implementing the core

part of the Chess game can be downloaded.

Fig.1b: Screenshot of XiangQi Wizard. All UI

and fixed Chinese Chess and AI are

implemented.

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As a result, the above tools are not ideal enough for AI developers to get start with.

Online tutorials require users to build the whole structure of the final chess game

executable by own. Code for displaying the data to UI, connection between the data

structure, AI algorithm and user input have to be implemented. This wastes a lot of

time for users to handle the non-AI related functions. Moreover, extra libraries and

code solutions may need to be searched for solving the technical problems. This

increases the chance of crashing and number of bugs of the final product.

Chess gaming program downloaded from the Internet is also not satisfactory. The

unmodifiable AI algorithm prohibits the user from testing their implementations. On

the other hand, the limited chess types discourage users from studying other chess

cases for the sake of enhancing their studies. This also discourages users from

designing new chess games.

Objectives

In order to tackle the problem observed, our project focuses on two major software

development goals: Developing a Chess game executable with a highly object-

oriented structure, which suits most kinds of chess game; and developing a Chess

making tool, Chreator, to generate the source codes of a chess game executable for

most types of chess game with pre-coded UI and game settings based on the user

configuration.

Chreator has a library of functions which builds the structure of a chess playing game.

Chreator provides a GUI with well-defined layout for user to setup the basic chess

board, chess piece, chess placing points, edges between points and simple game rules.

As a result, users easily access the provided UI library functions and template model

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structure for data structure and AI, to build their chess playing programs by simple

API calls, but without writing huge amount of codes for UI interaction

implementation and coordination of all the object components themselves. This saves

time from the simple but necessary coding.

Chreator is also able to open, save and compile chess game executable source code.

This allows them to test for their designs conveniently. Users can use Chreator to

open the old project and change the settings for later modification.

To conclude, Chreator is a platform for all people who are interested in making chess

playing game or program. It allows making of most chess types and their AI in a

flexible way by providing convenient chess game construction methods.

In the remaining parts of the report, program structure and methodology of Chreator,

the current progress and encountered difficulties will be discussed.

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Program structure

General structure

Chreator is basically a collection of low-level functions and a user interface for

accessing. These functions summarize common features and rules of different chess

playing game. Therefore, users can simply pass corresponding parameters to the

functions and generate a chess playing program. In order to enhance user experience

of using Chreator, a GUI is provided for inputting those parameters and generating

corresponding source code. On the other hand, users are also allowed to directly

modify the source code. The parameters shown on the GUI would change

automatically after saving. Finally, users could compile the source code to a chess

playing program (Refer to Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: General architecture of Chreator. An abstract overview of operating Chreator is

illustrated. The design aims to provide a middleman for easing the difficulties of making

chess game.

Library functions

These are pre-defined functions which generalize common features found in chess

games. Functions used to facilitate the implementation of AI are also stored in this

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location. Users are strongly discouraged to modify these codes to retain the programs’

stabilities. Several examples are listed as follow:

undoLastMove(): after executing this function, the most recent move will be

undone.

updateLegalMove(): after executing this function, the arraylist storing all legal

moves of the selected piece will be updated.

computerMakeMove(): user could specify how the computer move, parameter

could also passed as AI object.

GUI

The GUI of Chreator consists of five major parts. They are named as “Project

settings”, “Chessboard”, “Chess pieces”, “Game rule” and “AI”.

Project settings tab

Once Chreator is started, the “Project settings” screen would appear. Users can

choose to open a new or an existing project and specify its starting location. If a new

project is being opened, users can choose whether to use a template at this stage. Then

the type of chess game has to be selected. There are three major chess types in

Chreator. They are “piece adding”, “piece moving” and the combination of the

former two. After doing all these settings, users will be directed to the “Chessboard”

tab. Users could later return to this tab for compiling the project to form the resulted

chess playing program (Refer to Appendix Fig. 1).

Chessboard tab

The “Chessboard” tab requires users to upload a picture in JPEG form. The picture is

used to form the chessboard background. The way of setting the nodes for placing a

chess piece (These nodes will be called as “movable nodes” in later sessions if are

mentioned) is as fallow (Refer to Fig. 3):

1. Users specify the size of chessboard (n x m)

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2. A n x m grid would be generated on screen as a frame

3. Users move the whole frame on the uploaded picture to do rough adjustment

of all movable points’ positions

4. Users drag the points in the grid to do fine adjustment of each movable

point’s position

5. Users create additional points that are not able to be described as n x m

structure by simply clicking on the screen.

6. Users delete useless points

7. Users draw direction lines to specify edges (reachable points) of the

movable points. These lines are generated automatically in step 2. Users

would do fine adjustment in relation to step 5.

8. Board setting is finished and users proceed to the next step.

Fig. 3: “Chessboard” tab in operation. Blue dots represent moveable points. Red lines

represent possible direction relevant to a point. Structure of a board stored in computer is

clearly shown.

By offering this board setting method, we hope to provide users with high efficiency

together with convenience when setting up the board.

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Chess Piece tab

After establishing the chessboard, users can continue to build the next component,

chess pieces. Users would have to specify a piece’s name and outlook. If its initial

position is required, or any moving rule is needed, users may also specify in the

corresponding places. Moving rules and other special conditions of a piece (e.g.

Promotion of Western Chess) are usually defined in function forms. Although this

increases the flexibility of implementation, its convenience is being lowed. Thus

helping tools would be provided to help developing pieces’ moving rules. These tools

summarize some general moving rules. For examples,

stopWhenMeetingFirstPieceOnDirection(dir), allPointsOnDirection(dir), etc.

Moreover, as same kinds of pieces may appear on both players’ sides, a “clone piece”

button is available (Refer to Appendix Fig. 2).

General rule tab

Users are able to construct certain game rules in “Game rule” tab. Examples includes

time constraints, special moving rules involving interaction with particular

board position and conditions to be checked in each round. Most importantly,

winning or ending criteria will be defined in this tab (Refer to Appendix Fig. 3).

AI tab

The final tab is the “AI” tab. This tab is a Java code editor. Users with programming

knowledge can establish algorithms of AI here. Users can skip implementing this part

if AI is not required. However, users cannot play against the computer if this part is

not implemented. As game tree searching is one of the most common AI algorithms,

simple alpha-beta pruning searching would be implemented. Users need to write their

evaluation functions only.

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GUI flow overview

The general flow of creating a chess playing game is shown as follow:

Fig. 4: General program flow of Chreator GUI. This summarizes the operating

procedures when a user is using Chreator. Most of the procedures are bidirectional for

convenience.

Chess playing program

The resulted chess playing program contains several general features. Users can undo

moves, save current state and view AI thinking process (if has implemented & is

playing against computer). Moving history would also be shown on the screen.

Furthermore, debug mode is developed to enhance the effectiveness of development

process. Piece placing point with their ID number (not reference in Java) will be

printed on screen (Refer to Fig. 5a).

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Fig. 5a: Chess playing program (Western Chess) without Debug mode. Several

features are pre-installed on UI to enhance playing & developing experience. Users

can monitor resources used by displaying data in the spaces provided. This aims to

lower the burden of development.

Fig. 5b: Chess playing program (Xiang Qi) with Debug mode ON. Blue dots represent

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all points on board. Red dots represents available moving points of selected piece.

Users can inspect the setting comfortably.

Development progress

Chess game executable

All designated user interfaces of the chess game executable have been implemented.

At the same time, all features necessary for playing a piece capturing games are

supported. Changing of chess game (e.g. from Xiang Qi to Western Chess) can be

done by modifying several java source files, which facilitate further establishment of

connecting Chreator and chess game executable.

Chreator

The GUIs of “project setting” and “board setting” tabs are complete. The “board

setting” can provide designated features. Miscellaneous features such as fast-keys will

continue to be added. On the other hand, the “piece setting”, “rules setting” and “AI

setting” tabs are still under construction. However, their designs are basically

confirmed.

Limitations

According to current design, the implementation of moving rules on piece tab would

have very few differences with simple coding. This differs from our original objective:

to lower the difficulties of development. In order to offer compensation, more pre-

defined codes will be installed in Chreator. Users can access these helping tools by

clicking buttons provided. Corresponding codes will appear on screen afterwards.

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Future Development

In the meantime, Chreator and the chess game executable are still two separate

programs. The immediate next step is to establish connection between them. Chreator

will be able to generate the chess game executable after this step.

After that, we would continue to enrich the content of the chess game executable by

providing more gaming features. For examples, game situation editing and pre-

installed game tree searching algorithm. Online competing would also be added as a

bonus if time is allowed.

Furthermore, we would summarize more moving rules found on existing chess games

and add them into Chreator. We believe that providing more functions could enhance

makers’ experience.

Finally, testing will be performed to check against the coordination between AI

implementation and pre-defined functions in the chess game executable.

Conclusion To conclude, Chreator would have to focus more on its efficiency on building chess

game. At the same time, its methods of accessing and constructing rules have to be

refined more. After the above enhancement, more new features will be added to the

chess game executable, such as an online against function allowing users to share and

play with each other and game situation editing.

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Appendix

Fig. 1: Project settings tab

Fig. 2: Chess piece tab

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Fig. 3: Game rule tab