Run install.py to set up environment
A python program for playing chess in the console. The board is created using a mess of print statements and for loops.
How to play: First of all, if you don't know the rules of chess, click on this link. To run a game of chess, run the main.py file. During each turn, the screen will be printed out from the current player's perspective, and the current player will be promted to type in a move. Type in the moves using the following format, the location of the piece and the target location are seperated by an x: NumberLetterxNumberLetter. The numbers and letters are the classic chess board grid system. For example, the famous kings pawn opening for white would be e4xe5.
The main.py file contains the code that controls the actual gameplay. Run the main.py file to actually play chess.
The board.py file contains the board class definition. The board class contains all the methods used to check the board to control how pieces move, such as testing if a certain diagonal is free of pieces.
The pieces.py file contains the class definitions of all the different pieces. The individual pieces contain the methods that test if a given move is valid. When a piece object is created, it must be tied to a board object.
The extras.py file simply contains any extra global functions and variables used by all the other files.
The bot.py file contains all the code of the chess bot, and if it is run directly, it will retrain the neural network and serialize it to the bot.pkl file. If you want to run the bot.py file directly, head to this link ChessData, downlaod the csv files, and change the pathname in the code accordingly. The bot uses a simple look forward tree algorithm, but relies on a trained neural network for board state evaluations.
Why I made this: I am a computer science high school student who is interested in a variety of computer science related topics. I mostly code in python and java, but I have also dabbled in c and c++. A few months ago, I decided to set myself a challenge to code chess in python, something I didn't think I would be able to do at the time. Low and behold, a week or two of an unhealthy coding schedule later, I finished it! It isn't perfect, but I am proud of it, so a few days ago I decided to share it with the world.
What I do with it: The main purpose of this project was just to prove to myself that I could build a functioning console game in python, but since I made it, I've had a few fun explorations. One of those explorations was the chess bot, in the bot.py file. Also, just for fun, I used this project to make a custom command that allows me to play chess simply by typing "chess" into the macOS terminal. The code has some other extra functionality, like a FEN string to board and board to FEN string converter.
Playing against the bot: To play against the chess bot, simply call the openBot function, use the setColor method to set the bot's color (all lowercase), and set the ai_player parameter of play function to the resulting bot.
Disclaimers: Running the bot.py file will create an error if you haven't downloaded the ChessData and changed the file path in the code. If you play this on a dark color scheme console, the colors of the pieces might appear switched. To fix this, you can go to the init method of the piece classes and switch the black and white icons. Finally, by default, the board doesn't switch between white's and black's perspective after every move. You can turn this feature on by changing the switch parameter of the play function in main.py to False. Other parameters of the play function affect the style of the game.