Science - Sealed, Delivered.

Chess, Beautified

Fri Feb 20 2009

The Thinking Machine (v4) is a wonderful experience for both chess fanatics and fans of beautiful visualizations. Each move is transformed into a piece of art as the ‘thought process’ of the program is visualized. An added benefit to many is that, unlike most modern computers, this particular program is very beatable by players of reasonable strength. From the About TM4 page (emphasis ours):

When it is your (White’s) turn to move, the chess board will gently pulse to show the influence of the various pieces. in the left image below, you can see waves over the squares around the king and (very lightly) over the squares where the pawns might capture. When the machine (Black) is thinking, a network of curves is overlaid on the board; see image at right. The curves show potential moves–often several turns in the future–considered by the computer. Orange curves are moves by black; green curves are ones by white. The brighter curves are thought by the program to be better for white. […]

Why is the computer so [easy/hard] to beat?
The chess playing engine is designed to be at the same level as the average viewer of the piece. If you’re a tournament chess player, you would clobber most casual players–and you’ll clobber Thinking Machine 4 too. If you barely remember the rules of the game, the artwork may clobber you instead. The chess engine we built is simple and uses only basic algorithms from the 50s (alpha-beta pruning and quiescence search). The program’s unconventional initial moves may raise eyebrows among experts: we did not give it an “opening book” of standard lines since we wanted it to think through every position.

The goal of the piece is not to make an expert chess playing program but to lay bare the complex thinking that underlies all strategic thought.

The program appears to be anice implementation of modern visualization techniques, using the Java language and the wonderful Processing framework.

But enough talk. Give it a try here.