Chess UI

This is a chess UI which uses Python Chess and Pygame to implement a working chess board.

pip install python-chess
pip install pygame

Move Generation

I have included a sample move generation function in each example.py script. It generates a valid move at random from the list of all available moves. You will see that creating a random move generator with our library is very simple!

def random_move_generator(board):
    moves = list(board.legal_moves)
    return random.choice(moves)

A "move generator" is simply any function which accepts a chess.Board and returns a chess.Move. The goal of this project then is to use AI to create an intelligent move generator.

Game Initialization

To play a game, you just need to call the play_chess() function. It accepts two optional arguments, white and black with which you can pass any move generation function. Run example.py to try this out.

Use cases:

# Case 1. No arguments. The user will play both sides of the board.
play_chess()

# Case 2. The user will play white. The computer will play black.
play_chess(black=move_generation_function)

# Case 3. The user will play black. The computer will play white.
play_chess(white=move_generation_function)

# Case 4. The computer will play both sides.
play_chess(white=move_generation_function_a, black=move_generation_function_b)

Graphical User Interface

I learned enough about pygame to make a basic chess interface which can interact with our chess library. You can run example_gui.py to see the graphical interface in action.

Example 1. Initial Position

Example 2. Scholar's Mate

Terminal User Interface

The graphical interface is useful for human play, but the terminal interface is much more convenient for self-play, when the AI wants to play against itself, maybe many times in rapid succession. You can run example_tui.py to see the terminal interface in action as well.