Category: CSE Seminar Topics

Computer chess has a great history and the almost the first version of computer chess has emerged during the time of the machines Turk and the initial version supports functionalities like hoaxes and trickery.  It took almost 60 years to develop a modern computer chess game and this game is proved to be one of the best games ever developed across the gamming world. Chess is considered as the best and most attractive game and thus it has drawn an ample attraction of many academic research scholars.

The actual breakthrough for the computer chess game has emerged around the middle of 20^th century and the authors like Alan Turning and Claude Shannon has worked and presented work on the computer chess game. Claude Shannon has published an article known as Programming for computer chess game in 1950 and many other authors followed this.

Both these authors has given a rough idea how to program a computer chess game and even today many programmers are following the same lines to code the modern computer chess game with some additional features. As the technology has increased a lot during the last 40 years, the performance of the chess game has also increased due to the high end processors and technical advancements in the programming languages.

Computational power of computer has increased a lot such that it can make moves over million times faster when compared to humans and a best example for this is a match between Kasporv and Deep Blue machine, where the Deep blue has made 200 million moves, where the human user has made hardly three moves. 

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

Moves of the computer chess game are done with a separate numbering system used based on few numbers and the actual piece among all the possible 12 pieces that resides on a square is represented using these numbers. Following numbers are few sample considered here. A 0 represents an empty square, pawn is represented with 1, King is represented with 6, 2 is for Knight, 3 for Bishop and 4 is used for Rook. Positive numbers are used for white pieces and blacks are represented with negative numbers. Once these pieces and their relative position is decided using these numbers, all the possible moves based on the position of the piece can be done easily.

The validity of the move is checked with respect to the target piece on the desired square to move and the number of the piece on the on the target square. If the number 99 is observed on the target square, then it is considered as the illegal move and the move is not accepted as per the logic and if the square contains 0 or any positive integer, then it is considered as the legal  move, as 0 represents the empty square and positive number indicates a white piece.

There are some advanced techniques to this offset estimation are introduced later and the main logic in these techniques is based on the 64-bit integer, where each and every bit represents the square in the chess board and this approach is known as bit-board or bit-map approach. Bits are used as the important entity in this approach and as mentioned each bit represent the square in the 8X8 board and the bit value 1 indicates that there is a piece in that particular square and 0 indicate that the corresponding square is empty. 

Offset representation using an 8X8 grid is a traditional method of representing the squares in the chess board and the modern approach computer chess games are developed in the lines of 10X12 grids to identify the illegal moves easily and also the edges of the board.

The squares that were assigned additionally are given some large numbers like 99 such that the out of bound moves can be easily tracked. A typical model this type of chess board is given below.

Once the board representation and the move generation are done, the very next step is to decide the right move from the possible moves and this really a tedious task to be accomplished across the chess game. All the possible moves are represented in the form of a tree and searching of the tree would result to the required and accurate move.

Nodes of the tree constructed represent the corresponding board positions and the possible moves against this position are represented by the branches of the tree. There are different tree searching algorithms that can be used to find the possible moves across the board. As per the calculation of Bean (2007), there are exactly 69,352,859,712,417 numbers of possible moves at the node depth of 10 in the search tree constructed. The tree searching algorithm based on their operation can be categorized in to two different types namely type A and type B.

Type A method deals with evaluating all the possible moves and the corresponding outcomes if the corresponding move is made and Type B deals with how good the move is based on the situation of the game. Recent developed chess games use the mix of both the Type A and Type B methods to decide the move in the computer chess game. Initially type A searching is done and then the actual refinement is done using the type B method to make the right move.

Once the possible moves are decided, the next step in the chess game design is to decide the possible moves of the opponent. The most famous algorithm that can be used for deciding the moves of the opponent is alpha-beta pruning algorithm and this algorithm can be used to estimate the moves of the opponents easily. 

Introduction to Artificial intelligence in games Design:

Artificial intelligence has emerged in the present gaming world with lot of enhanced features and thus provides excellent gaming logic with number of algorithms and programs that provides the end users with excellent gaming experience.

Different AI algorithms like search and minimal spanning techniques are widely used across the chess game and thus the AI has wide scope to improve the gaming feature of the chess game and provides lot of entertainment to the users.

The intelligent moves made by the computer are purely based on the algorithms used across the AI program and when compared to the human intelligence, AI provides an equivalent and more intelligent actions towards the chess game.

A desktop chess game provides all the possible moves once the opponent makes a move and the intelligence factor used by the AI algorithms is really complex in making the moves when compared to the human players.

As the chess game has great attraction across the gaming world, it has motivated to do a single user desktop chess game using the possible AI algorithms in this project and the main of the project, with the possible deliverable and the research questions identified to proceed with this research as given as below.

In general these games can be of different types based on the gamming capabilities and the most important classification is as given below

Single user games: In general these games are played by a single user against the computer and the actual coding logic is developed such that, the game will be between the user and the computer.

Multi user games: Multi user games are played between two or more users on a single computer or multiple computers. These games can be either desktop games or online games. The most famous among the multi user games are online chess game, Rummy and Cricket.

Social networking games: Social networking games are famous these days and few social networks like FaceBook offers a game known as Farm vile, where the registered users of that particular network can play the game online and earn some points and gifts.

All the games mentioned above are most successful implementation of Artificial Intelligence and these games are developed with great user friendly features and provide excellent level of comfort to the end users.

Introduction to Gaming Seminar Topic:

 In general these games are developed with the intention to entertain the users and also earn profits by selling the licensed versions of the games and even the actual revenue generated with these games is really good for most of the companies and thus a competitive market has established across these gamming world.

These games are designed with reference to some real time and tradition games and the best example among them is the Chess game. Chess game is a age old game which can be used to test the mental ability and IQ of a person and thus this game is very famous among the computer gamming users. Even there are some sophisticated games being developed across the gamming world and few of them are developed with reference to famous personalities in the world, successful movies or characters in the real time.

By including all these aspects, end users are attracted towards these games and show their personal interest in playing the games. The main target of the gamming companies is to develop the games in a manner such that the end users should feel comfortable in playing the games and lot of tricky moves should be eliminated and always a rich user interface attracts the users and improves the interest of the users to play a particular game.

To achieve this lot of companies are coming forwards to offer great features and facilities to their games and improve a good customer based across the gamming world. 

Introduction to Online Gaming Seminar Topic:

Gaming is the most commonly used word across the internet world and it is proved that a lot of revenue is generated against these gaming programs. There are different types of desktop games and web based games available these days and most of them provide great entertainment to the end users irrespective of their knowledge levels on the computers and the corresponding technologies used across developing these games. There are famous games that were commonly played by most of the computer users and few of them are listed below

• Chess
• Cards
• Race games
• Shooting games
• Adventure games etc

All these games provide great user experience with the high end technologies behind them and even the user interface provided to these games makes the players comfortable to play the game with the well defined instructions in the game menus. Rich user interface and the excellent screen resolution capabilities along with the live sounds are the main attraction for these games and thus most of the companies are concentrating on the high end games which can be played at a certain level of comfort and ease to make the necessary moves in the games accordingly.