Software
Minimax Chess Engine
A daunting exercise in pointers and memory management. The final engine can resolve a minimax search 5 moves deep in under 1 second.
Overview
Building a chess engine from scratch requires mastering both the domain knowledge of chess and the low-level systems programming necessary for performance. This project is a deep dive into algorithms, data structures, and memory management.
Technical Details
- ▸Minimax search algorithm with alpha-beta pruning
- ▸5-ply (move) search depth in under 1 second
- ▸Hand-crafted board evaluation heuristics
- ▸Efficient move generation using bitboards
- ▸Implemented in C for maximum performance
The Challenge
Chess engines require careful management of game state across thousands of recursive calls. This project was as much an exercise in low-level C programming (pointers, memory allocation, bitwise operations) as it was in game tree search.
The key insight that enabled 5-ply search within the time budget was alpha-beta pruning, which eliminates branches of the search tree that cannot affect the final decision, dramatically reducing the effective branching factor.
The code for this project can be found on Github.