Math Review Week 2
Highlights of what I (re)learned in week #2 of my math studies.
Artificial intelligence
Back to school: teaching an old dog new tricks
I've determined that my early sixties is as good a time as any to begin an intensive self-study of mathematics! I haven't decided on a specific area of focus yet (what's the rush!), but I'm leaning toward data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence. I think a more specific focus will become clear as I progress.
Chess: generating moves
Generating Moves
Part of the How to Program a Chess Engine in Lisp series.
This post will cover basic game state and move generation.
Chess: the chess move
The Chess Move
Part of the How to Program a Chess Engine in Lisp series.
This post will cover the following tasks, in preparation for generating chess moves:
- A macro for conveniently encoding fields in a fixnum integer
- An efficient encoding of a chess move
- Basic game state
Chess: Forsyth-Edwards Notation
FEN - Forsyth-Edwards Notation
Part of the How to Program a Chess Engine in Lisp series.
Now that we have pieces and a board, we need a convenient way of setting pieces on the board in specific positions. We'll use this, not only for the initial position of a game, but also to configure a board with specific game scenarios for testing and debugging.
The standard way to do this is to use FEN, or Forsyth-Edwards Notation: [Wikipedia] [Chess Programming Wiki]
Here is the source for fen.rkt
Chess: the chess board
The Chess Board
Part of the How to Program a Chess Engine in Lisp series.
One of the most significant design decisions for a chess engine is how to model the chess board. I think the most competitive engines use a bitboard representation; however, for our purposes, a mailbox representation is more intuitive and easy to visualize. In particular, we will use a 10 x 12 board.
Here is the source for board.rkt
Chess: the chess piece
The Chess Piece
Part of the How to Program a Chess Engine in Lisp series.
Donald Knuth is credited with the statement:
...We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.
Chess programming is most assuredly in the 3%! Our challenge in this series will be to strike a reasonable balance between efficiency and clarity. Our first opportunity to that end is the chess piece.
Here is the source for piece.rkt
How to Program a Chess Engine in Lisp
Last updated 2024-11-29 18:48
Table of Contents
Introduction
Programming a competent chess engine in lisp has been a goal of mine for some time. I finally did so in 2021, and it was a lot of fun! My new goal is to rewrite the code in a step by step way that emphasizes clarity, and to present it as a clear tutorial for writing a chess engine, and as a general Racket tutorial.
Peter Norvig on Gradient Dissent Podcast
Someone on the Julia Slack mentioned this interview with Peter Norvig on the Gradient Dissent podcast.
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The 4th edition of Peter's book, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" was released earlier this year.
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When asked, "Do you think that Python will continue to be the main programming language for ML for the next decade?", Peter replied, "Looking at where we are today, I guess I would be happier if Julia was the main language" ! (40:34)