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Programming for kids – How to program a chess program in BASIC
Other Related articles
- Huo Chess Main Page
- How to Develop a Chess program for Beginners Series
- Programming a chess application in QBasic (QB64)
- How to develop a chess program from scratch (for total beginners) series
- Check our affiliate chess-programming portal!
Programming is fun.
Want to learn? Why not start now?
And what better way there is than to develop an advanced program that makes the computer “think” how to play chess?! Forget about those silly beginners’ example programs which print “Hello world”. Who in his right mind ever spends time to write a program which prints “Hello world” on the screen?
BASIC is fun.
A very easy language for kids to start learning programming. So we will use it here. (Not in the mood for BASIC? Search for the Java and C# relevant tutorials in Harmonia Philosophica!)
And in one day, you will have learnt the basic of how to program a chess program in BASIC! The actual implementation could take a bit longer but in general in some days you will have the knowledge of how the program works, thus being in a position to improve it or write your own!
The BASIC programming language is one of the simplest ones. Especially designed for simplicity, it uses simple commands to perform operations. The commands are easy to learn and use, since they are utilizing English language words which are easily recognizable. Want to print something on the screen? Use the command PRINT! Want to determine what will happen if something else happens? Use the command IF! See what I mean?
IF YOU_UNDERSTAND = "Yes" THEN PRINT "Yes I understand!"
Did you understand the above command? Great!
The only thing that might trouble you if you are new to programming is the notion of variables. A variable is an element which holds values. This element is used in various places of the program. The values could be of different types – the ones we will use are integers (1, 4, 10…) and strings/ characters (e.g. “white pawn”).
Variables could be stored also in arrays. An array is a collection of variables in one or more dimensions. It is also known as a “table”. And yes, you guessed right: we will use an array (table) to store the chessboard. Could you guess the dimensions of that table? Spot on again.
DIM SHARED chessboard$(8, 8)
The command DIM defines a variable. We do all the variable declarations in the beginning of the program. The above command declares an 8×8 array which holds the… you guessed it right: The chessboard!
By the way, we are using QBasic64, a version of Quick Basic that is available for free and pretty popular as well. Check https://www.qb64.org/portal/ to get it. The site also contains excellent tutorials and training material. You will have it as a reference throughout the whole process, so make sure you create a bookmark out of it.
After you download QBasic64 from the site, just click on the QB64.exe file and execute it. You will be presented with the IDE (programming interface) of QBasic where you will write your program. I do not need to explain the “Create new”, “Save” or “Save as” functions…
Just start writing the commands and then press “Save as”. Executing the program is easy as well. Just select Run > Start.
As said above, what is the first thing to do? (Besides the “Create new program” part and saving it in a folder of your choosing with a name of your choosing as well)
Some of the first things to do we already mentioned.
First, declare the variables. BASIC is really simple in the sense that it is not so strict in requiring you to declare all the variables before using them, in contrast to other high level languages like C#. However this is also a downside of the language. Leaving the programmer with some slack makes the programmer careless.
So we will declare all the variables we use…
DEFINT A-Z
OPTION BASE 1 'Make tables dimensions start from 1
DIM SHARED chessboard$(8, 8)
COMMON SHARED startingRank, startingColumn
COMMON SHARED finishingRank, finishingColumn
COMMON SHARED startingRankText$, startingColumnText$
COMMON SHARED finishingRankText$, finishingColumnText$
COMMON SHARED Move$
COMMON SHARED MovingPiece$
COMMON SHARED debugMode
There you go. (Read the QB64 Wiki for what DEFINT A-Z and OPTION BASE 1 commands do – Remember, learning entails the process of… learning)
What is next?
What else?
Ask the user for input!
And what else to ask than his first move! For simplicity purposes we will present the main command which tells the user to put his move. The drawing of the board on the screen will be done by the drawBoard() function. A function is an independent set of code that you can call to perform an action. In our case we call the drawBoard function (with the command… CALL DRAWBOARD – I told you it was simple). For the time being forget how the function works. (Even though reading through it and trying to understand how it works would be a lesson on its own…)
So how would you ask for the user input?
Simple by the command… INPUT!
There you go:
INPUT "Enter your move: ", Move$
This command tells the computer to wait for the user to enter something and press Enter. When this happens, the text entered by the user is saved in the Move$ variable. The dollar sign ($) indicates that the variable is a string (text) and not a number.
Let’s stay there.
For now you have learnt how to…
- Create a new program.
- Declare the variables you will use (including the chessboard).
- Ask from the user to enter his first move.
You have also been acquainted with the notions of variables and functions and with some basic BASIC (get the joke?) commands, like IF… THEN or INPUT and PRINT. Don’t worry if you don’t get everything yet. You will as you program more and more every day.
Next lessons will include the next logical steps:
- Validate that the user move is valid and legal.
- Redraw the chessboard with the move of the user.
- Make the computer think of an answer.
You would be surprised how the last part (the thinking of the computer) is a rather simple one. In essence the computer thinks of all possible moves, validates them (in the same way we will validate the move entered by the user) and then for the valid ones it will calculate a score of the position. The move with the best score will be the move of the computer.
Until next time…
Happy coding!
Next lesson: How to check the legality of the move entered! Check here.