Abstract:
Chess has been played for a long time. The first time its computer program
was developed, there were still so many flaws and it kept progressing to the point of
today’s chess program. In this thesis, Minimax and Alpha-Beta Pruning will be the
main algorithm used to be an AI for the chess engine. The topic of chess engine is an
interesting one, which is why this is proposed as a thesis topic.
Alpha-Beta Pruning is an improvement of Minimax algorithm which prune
(cut out) the minimax tree that is considered as a bad decision. This algorithm has
been used extensively by a lot of two player games such as chess, connect four,
congklak, go, shogi etc. Considering its effectiveness, this topic thesis will be
implementing it to the custom chess engine.
This thesis, Custom Chess Engine using Minimax and Alpha-Beta Pruning
Algorithm will focus mainly on the chess AI with a varieties of difficulty. Each
difficulty, however, will make whether Minimax or Alpha-Beta Pruning. It is also
possible to use only Minimax for the easier difficulty. The program implementation
for this thesis will be using the waterfall software engineering strategy with the help
of bottom-up paradigm. Main difficulty would be implementing the algorithm itself
and connecting the algorithm with the game UI and change the difficulty of the bot.
