Today I added another set of options to picoEngine. Since it can now think through up to 8 ply, I needed to give it an option to choose how many ply you want it to think through. The commit is simple enough, which you can check out, but here is …

Okay, so I've been going on and on about making picoEngine think through multiple ply, and it really has been a challenge. I think this latest commit finally fixed it with the ability to think through up to 8 ply. That might seem like a lot, but the grandmaster level …

Last post I was really excited about granting picoEngine permission to make multi-ply moves. However, I came to realize that while it was considering the end result of multiple ply moves, it was still only making the current move based on a single ply decision.

So, in layman's terms: It …

With so many of my posts being about mobile phones, this title might seem misleading. However, I am not implying that picoEngine is on a mobile phone, but rather that I have added the ability for it to determine the mobility of the pieces on the board.

So far, picoEngine …

Hopefully, the above gif loaded for you. It's not much to look at, but it is really neat to see the output and evaluation from picoEngine as it calculates through multiple moves before making a decision. At present, it is set to 3 ply, which means, if I play as …

While this may not seem like a real feat to many, I'm actually really excited about this. For the first time, picoEngine actually made an "informed decision" of what move to make. Granted, it is still making poor decisions, but they are at least no longer random.

Keeping in mind …

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One of the side projects I have been working on is playing around with my new to me smart watch, an LG Urbane (W150). Among the different projects, I built TWRP for …

While certainly nothing fancy, I have added a quick material evaluation to picoEngine. Up till now, I've been using picoEngine with random moves on. It is an option that by default is off, but the end user can choose to play against the engine in random move mode, where the …

After hours of toil and pain, I realized that I was going about this all wrong, and then in 15 minutes enabled the ability for picoEngine to choose to en passant. It is amazing how far off track I was, and how quickly it could be fixed when I was …

One of the key things that any chess engine needs to be able to do, is take the input from the calling program with regards to en passant. With a little algebra, it wasn't too hard to set up:

Fortunately, it was pretty easy to add the ability for the …