The functionality of the computer chess game can be formed due to three important characteristics as mentioned below and these aspects make computer to make more moves when compared to a human user.
- Board representation and move generation
- Tree searching techniques
- Positional evaluation
Board representation plays a vital role in deciding the moves and the move generation is purely depend on the board representation. Interpretation of the moves made by the computer depends on the representation of the board in the computer memory. A two dimensional array and an 8X8 grid is used to represent the board in the computer memory.
Each square in the chess box is assigned a unique number with in the range of 64 numbers and this process is known as offset or mailbox representation. The squares in the boards are numbered from 0 to 63 along 0 to h8 receptively as shown in the below figure