Suggested Execises

• Extend Sather Tutorial Chess to print out all moves of the game in standard chess notation after the game is over.

• If the user decides to have a computer player, the random number generator always is initialized with the same seed. Extend Sather Tutorial Chess to ask the user for his name. Then from this name compute a seed to initialize the random number generator.

• Introduce a new subtype of $PLAYER that inherits the implementation of MINMAX. Call this class ALPHABETA and implement an Alpha-Beta-Search to improve the expertise of the automatic player. You might want to change the routine setup of MAIN to create an ALPHABETA player instead of a MINMAX player.

• Change POS to be a value class. Instead of having the internal addressing scheme that numbers the positions of the board from 0 to 63 in variable absolute, the positions should be represented with two integers, one for the row number and the other for the number of the column. Obviously, nearly all routines in POS have to be changed to reflect that choice. Other than that the code is relatively independent of the implementation of POS. There might be some problems when POS objects are tested to be void. Furthermore, the routine is the only place outside of board.str that knows about the internal addressing used in POS. Note, that the new internal addressing eases the complexity of the computation of neighboring elements slightly. Instead of divisions and modulo operations, a routine is_off_board could be used to deal with all the necessary plausibility testing.

• See section 1.4 for further suggestions.