Playing Chess On A Microcontroller

[Arthur Benemann] started a little project for his electrical engineering program, and suffered the worst case of feature creep we’ve ever seen. He just posted an instructable of his picChess project that is able to play chess on a VGA monitor with a keyboard, with sound, a clock, temperature sensor. Apparently, [Arthur] was bored one evening and threw in an implementation of Conway’s game of life.

[Arthur] chose a DSPIC33F μC for his project with everything laid out on a bread board. He’s quite proud of his VGA routine, the first time he’s ever used DMA. We’re really impressed by [Arthur]’s chess engine – his is the first homebrew chess engine we’ve seen on Hack A Day. Although the engine is a brute-force search with Alpha-beta pruning, the engine itself seems fairly advanced that will even supports castling.

Although a few rules aren’t supported and the ELO rating of the engine isn’t known, [Arthur]’s engine should still be able to beat an amateur player. A fairly impressive feat indeed.

Check out [Arthur]’s video after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G27dC_rapko&w=470]

19 thoughts on “Playing Chess On A Microcontroller

  1. I was just trying to use most peripherals, there is a screen where a analog clock showing the current time and date, I thought an environment temperature reading would be nice and would make me use the ADC of the pic ( the temp. sensor is a LM35).

  2. When selecting the deep of search the sound are the same as Duke Nukem 3D.

    If I had a screen at hand I would do it, a graphic LCD would be nice.

    The dsPIc family its nice, but no DSP functions are used in this project. The new microchip family PIC24E, would better suited to this project.It’s DMA can access 4k of RAM, and the run up to 60 MIPs

  3. From the text:

    ————————
    Although the engine is a brute-force search with Alpha-beta pruning, the engine itself seems fairly advanced that will even supports castling.
    ————————

    First, there’s the completely screwed up “that will even supports castling.” No one noticed this epic bit of word farting? Second, there’s the question of the quality of the engine. Is the engine just some brute force thing, or is it an advanced engine? It can’t be both. It *can* be a brute force engine with an advanced feature or two, but you can’t describe the engine itself as both brute force and advanced.

    Also, this is also from the text:

    ————————
    … able to play chess on a VGA monitor with a keyboard, with sound, a clock, temperature sensor.
    ————————

    Seriously, that sentence is totally screwed up. There’s the obvious lack of “and a” before the word temperature, but in general it reads like something a 4th grader wrote. How about something grammatically and syntactically correct such as:

    ————————
    … able to play chess on a VGA monitor while also supporting peripherals like a keyboard, sound, clock, and a temperature sensor.
    ————————

    Come on guys, you constantly get knocked for poor writing and you *still* can’t be bothered proofreading your stuff? Isn’t there an editor at Hackaday? That’s one of the things an editor is supposed to do – proofread. Why not set a policy that no article get published until at least two other people have read and signed off on it?

    You’re not really generating that much content (in terms of raw word count) per day, so there’s really no excuse for the constant errors in spelling, grammar, and syntax.

  4. “He just posted an instructable of his picChess project that is able to play” a game very similar to chess “on a VGA monitor with a keyboard, with sound, a clock, temperature sensor.”

    FTFY

    http://www.fide.com/component/handbook/?id=124&view=article

    actually (forgiving three-fold repetition and the fifty-move rule which are arbitrary drawing rules as opposed to the piece movement rules) if it doesn’t support en passant capturing then it’s not even playing chess, it’s playing a game similar to chess that actually eases the burden on a defender.

    from the wikipedia article on en passant linked in the above article:
    “This rule was added in the 15th century when the rule giving pawns the option of initially moving two squares was introduced. It prevents a pawn from using the two-square move to pass another pawn without the risk of being captured (Hooper & Whyld 1992:124).”

    ftfy :P

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