CUSTOM CHESE ENGINE USING MINIMAX AND ALPHA-BETA PRUNING ALGORITHM

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.