Saturday, June 26, 2004
Chess influence
I found myself being dragged to a chess club meeting at Spring's church. Not being much of a chess player, and not wanting to play, I took along my laptop to keep me occupied (the chess club is more for The Kids than any of us adults).
Unfortunately, I didn't prepare fully, and not having wireless access at the church, I found myself with not much to work on. I then decided to use the time to write a program I've been meaning to work on for some time.
One of the problems I have with chess is seeing the influence each piece has over the rest of the board. With that in mind, the program I wrote displays the board not with the standard checkerboard pattern, but colors the squares as to “ownership” of the board. In my case, blue squares denote that black owns that square, red squares show white influence, yellow squares convey conflicting influence where both black and white could claim ownership and grey (of which the sample picture lacks) show no influence whatsoever of that square.
I didn't quite finish at the chess club meeting; the big obstacle was the lack of suitable graphics for the pieces. Afterwards I played a bit more on fleshing out the program, grabing images from xboard. Right now the pieces can't be moved (they're placed there at program startup) but at least I got most of the infrastructure down, and I have something I can work on the next time I get dragged to a chess club meeting.
