Please think about chess. Is a square empty? enemy piece occupied? friendly piece occupied? What is the active piece? what type of piece is the active piece? what events occur if a certain piece is captured or a certain positoin is reached? Is there a formula flexible enough that I could add fairy pieces at a whim? that is what I am looking for. I know this is not the most appropriate place to post, but If I had anywhere else they would point me to C code examples. THX

eh?

crap,

I am looking for help designing a formula for
a chess type game.

I know the math has already been worked out and
I was hoping to get some info.

no worries though, there are a few other resources I can check

what do you mean by a flexible formula? why not just run through the pieces and apply the regular chess-rules?

If you mean a good heuristic, most chess programs just use a weighted sum of the pieces on the board. pawn = 1, knight = 3 ...
Most of the work is then really done by searching thru as much of the space as quickly as possible. Which is why Big Blue beat Kasparov, through sheer computing power. It is also why computers aren''t that good at Go yet, seeing as there are at least 200 legal moves a turn, and a static evaluation won''t work, as it is usually meaningless.

Little Spikey Land

thanks lil'' that helps...

sorry I''m so inarticulate on this...

basically, I was under the assumption that there is a
known mathmatical formula for how a bishop can move
on an 8x8. and you can plug into it the starting position
of the bishop and it will return possible move for that turn.

of course, I could be wrong and there is no such thing...