Fwd: [Haskell-beginners] Chessboard Module, opinions on…

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Andrew Wagner Date: Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 11:19 AM Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Chessboard Module, opinions on… To: iæfai Ah, ok. You may also be interested in this protocol then: http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/engine-intf.html . It's a widely-used standard for communication between chess AIs and UIs. On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 11:07 AM, iæfai wrote:

I am not making an AI, I am using an existing AI, so how I store it internally will not be of consequence to it.

- iæfai

On 2009-10-28, at 8:00 AM, Andrew Wagner wrote:

Just a note to let you know: it's virtually impossible to use a

...

linked-list-of-linked-list or two-dimensional-array board representation as the basis of a serious AI. It's just too inefficient (see http://www.cis.uab.edu/hyatt/boardrep.html for some other options).

That said, if you want to use this as the basis of being able to play through games or something, it's great.

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 2:11 AM, Joe Fredette wrote: Awesome, have you cabal-ized it? If not, it's pretty simple (look up 'cabal' on the haskellwiki). Then you can upload it to hackage to be toyed with.

One thing that might be a cool direction to go w/ your project (sounds like you intend to make a chess playing program, this is somewhat orthogonal to that goal) is to build a "playback" machine. For instance, I play chess with people by email on a fairly regular basis. Specifically, we submit moves to one another in semi-standard[1] algebraic chess notation. So I might see a game like:

1. Kb3 e5 2. d3 d6 ... n. a4->a5 e6->d7

Where the first move is White, moving his knight to B-3, then black moves his pawn from e7 to e5. etc. a move followed by a * is a check, followed by two stars is a mate. etc. You can poke at the wiki page for ACN for the appropriate syntax. My suggestion is that- often times we go many days in between moves, and so I don't keep track (in my head) of the last few moves he made, which can sometimes indicate weak points/general strategies. It would be _really_ nice to be able to replay old board positions at will, given this ACN notation of the game. Might be a nice (simple) use case for Parsec, and I imagine that most chess engines will have something like that (assuming they operate on STDIN/OUT) -- even if the syntax may be different. This will give you the "backend" to plug it onto anyway.

Anywho, good luck with your project, it looks nice!

/Joe

PS, Just noticed the little function you use to display the board (and stuff). You may want to poke around the 2d Pretty printers on hackage, they may make it easier/more extensible to render the board. Also, `cout`? Someone's got a bit o' the ++ in 'em... :)

[1] Okay, we mostly make it up, but it's _consistently_ arbitrary...

On Oct 28, 2009, at 1:56 AM, iæfai wrote:

I have just recently finished a 'ChessBoard' module that is meant to represent a chess board. I could use some opinions and/or suggestions on the module.

To give an example of how this can be used right now, and was my immediate goal, you can do this:

*ChessBoard> putStr $ cout defaultBoard +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+ | RB | NB | BB | QB | KB | BB | NB | RB | +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+ | PB | PB | PB | PB | PB | PB | PB | PB | +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+ | | | | | | | | | +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+ | | | | | | | | | +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+ | | | | | | | | | +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+ | | | | | | | | | +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+ | PW | PW | PW | PW | PW | PW | PW | PW | +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+ | RW | NW | BW | QW | KW | BW | NW | RW | +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

I have not determined exactly how I will be making moves, but the logic will not be in my program. I am going to be using a chess engine in another process (I haven't chosen a chess engine yet that works on both windows and mac through stdin/stdout).

The module itself follows, I appreciate any thoughts you might have.

module ChessBoard where

import Data.Sequence import Data.Foldable import Data.Maybe import Data.List as List

class NiceLook a where cout :: a -> String

data Piece = Bishop | Rook | Knight | King | Queen | Pawn | NoPiece deriving (Show, Eq)

instance NiceLook Piece where cout Bishop = "B" cout Rook = "R" cout Knight = "N" cout Queen = "Q" cout Pawn = "P" cout King = "K" cout _ = " "

data Colour = Black | White | NoColour deriving (Show, Eq)

instance NiceLook Colour where cout Black = "B" cout White = "W" cout NoColour = " "

-- error "..." might be useful

data Square = Square Piece Colour deriving (Show, Eq)

instance NiceLook (Square) where cout (Square p c) = (cout p) ++ (cout c)

data Row = Row (Seq Square) deriving (Show, Eq)

instance NiceLook (Row) where cout (Row s) = "|" ++ foldMap (\x -> " " ++ cout x ++ " |") s -- thnx Saizan

makeRow n = case (List.length n) of 8 -> Row (fromList n) _ -> error "Row is not 8 squares"

makeColouredSquares n c = makeRow $ map makeSquare (zip n (replicate 8 c))

makeSquare (n,c) = Square n c

pawns = [Pawn, Pawn, Pawn, Pawn, Pawn, Pawn, Pawn, Pawn] back = [Rook, Knight, Bishop, Queen, King, Bishop, Knight, Rook] blank = [NoPiece, NoPiece, NoPiece, NoPiece, NoPiece, NoPiece, NoPiece, NoPiece]

data Board = Board (Seq Row) deriving (Show, Eq)

instance NiceLook (Board) where cout (Board c) = borderOutput ++ "\n" ++ (foldMap (\x -> cout x ++ "\n" ++ borderOutput ++ "\n") c)

defaultBoard = Board (makeColouredSquares back Black <| makeColouredSquares pawns Black <| makeColouredSquares blank NoColour <| makeColouredSquares blank NoColour <| makeColouredSquares blank NoColour <| makeColouredSquares blank NoColour <| makeColouredSquares pawns White <| makeColouredSquares back White <| empty)

borderOutput = "+" ++ (List.foldr1 (++) $ replicate 8 "----+")

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