Genetic Chess

An amateur attempt at breeding a chess-playing AI.

This program attempts to create a chess-playing AI by playing prospective AIs against each and letting the winners produce mutated copies. As evidence that this has a chance of working, here's a plot from a recent run of the value that the AIs place on each type of piece.

It took awhile (tens of thousands of generations), but it did figure out that the queen was an important piece. The vertical axis has arbitrary units that indicate the relative value of each piece type.

See the doc/ folder for an in-depth description of the running and working of this project.

Quick start to play a game

1. Clone this repository to your computer.
2. make
   • If on Windows and Visual Studio is installed, open Genetic_Chess.sln and compile.
3. bin/release/genetic_chess -genetic genetic_ai_example.txt -human
   • or, if you want to play white: bin/genetic_chess -human -genetic genetic_ai_example.txt
   • If compiling with Visual Studio, look in x86\Release or x64\Release for the compiled program.
4. Do not expect to be impressed by the quality of play.

Quick start to starting a gene pool

1. Clone this repository to your computer.
2. make
   • If on Windows and Visual Studio is installed, open Genetic_Chess.sln and compile.
3. Edit gene_pool_config_example.txt to adjust the number of simultaneous games to a number less than or equal to the number of processors on your computer.
4. bin/release/genetic_chess -genepool gene_pool_config_example.txt
   • If compiling with Visual Studio, look in x86\Release or x64\Release for the compiled program.
5. About once a day, pause the gene pool with Ctrl-C and run analysis/run_all_plots.sh pool.txt to generate plots and other data showing the evolution and behavior of the specimens.
   • This script requires the program octave to run.