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Chess influence
[Influence of Chess Pieces] [1]
I found myself being dragged to a chess club meeting at Spring's [2] church
[3]. 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 [4] 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 [5]. 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.
[1]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/gPhlog:2004/06/26/chessboard.gif
[2]
http://www.springdew.com/
[3]
http://www.uufbr.org/
[4]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/gPhlog:2004/06/26/chessboard.gif
[5]
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/xboard/
Email author at
[email protected]
