Sunday, January 29, 2012

Virutor Chess - New Chapter

Welcome to the blog on Virutor Chess - a chess programming project

It has been some years now since I started with chess programming. The last but one, quite promising try ended with a corrupted hard disk. I had the data recovered, but that didn't really succeeded and the project needed to be brushed off and rebuilt anyway ;-). After some time I started to build up on the remaining torso. I took one module (mostly this just meant one source file) at a time, brushed it off, refactored, wrote a unit test for it and then finally committed all the resurrected and the new code (yes, experince finally tought me to use revision control). Soon I had all the important parts of the old project renewed and integrated this way. I even added some features that I had never had. Finally I got to the point where the program worked fine and was not that easy to beat. Therefore I thought the time was ripe to make it public. Today the first official versions for Windows and Android are released.

Virutor Chess is written in C/C++ and it is currently only a UCI engine without UI. Available are versions for Windows and for Chess for Android. I really enjoy working on this project and even though I know I will most likely not grab even a small market share, who knows where I can get (ELO > 3000?).

Last but not least, I would like to thank HP for giving me an exception to the company policy and letting me work on Virutor Chess as my purely personal project. Riding on the wave of narcissism I am adding a link to a scene from Pirates of Silicon Valley where this HP policy is referred to in connection with Steve Wozniak.

I am looking forward to posting more articles and, hopefully, getting some feedback both on the blog and on the project from the readers.

Be sure not to miss the project site