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 …
As you can see from the above screenshot, one of the engines possible moves is e8g8, which is for the black king to castle on the king's side. This is great news. Previously, I had given the engine the ability to accept the input for castling, but it could not …
After about an hour of accomplishing nothing, I finally gave up on what I was doing and fixed the UCI input for "movpos" when castling. So now, if given the move for castling, it moves the rook as well as the king!
You can check out the whole commit on …
Today, I stumbled on perhaps the most ingenious use of ADB ever:
A program and write-up by Marian Schedenig, that they shared on their website. This is perhaps the best adb tool I have ever seen, in that it takes three simple principles …
One of the problems I find with video editing, is sometimes it becomes very complicated to do something very simple. Take my current need. I needed to simply tie two mp4 files together, unedited, just hook one to the next. There are lots of gui types, but that requires opening …
It's really important to note that if a pawn gets promoted, it becomes the new piece, whatever that piece is. Either a knight, bishop, rook, or queen. While this was happening in the interface, it was not being recognized by picoEngine. Since picoEngine didn't know it was promoted, it would …
What good is king safety if the king refuses to capture it's attacker? I guess I had programmed a cowardly lion... er... uh... king. Actually the real problem was that of where the king "was" on the board, per my code.
// For checking if the king is safe.

int z …
Okay, it's time to work on moves for the last piece: the pawn. Believe it or not, the pawn is the most difficult piece for me to program. It has so many small idiosyncrasies. If you are on the home row, you can go two spaces, but not any other …