A chess game developed in Java. Utilizes object-oriented principles such as classes, inheritance, abstraction and others. Abstract classes are used for the Move (AttackingMove, CastleMove, etc.), Piece (Queen, Rook, Knight, etc.), and Player (BlackPlayer, WhitePlayer, etc.) features.

I am also currently in the process of developing an engine for this game, which has been a challenging experience. The engine will use previous games in order to build a tree of possible moves and assign point-values to those moves. Then, the engine will use the Minimax algorithm to determine the best move for the next player. Assume there are 2 players MIN and MAX. As the name suggests, MIN wants to minimize the score and MAX wants to maximize the score.

So, calling minimax(L), where L is the current layer of the move tree being analyzed, will return the following.

• If player(L) = MIN, which means MIN is playing on layer L, then return min(result(L,a)) over all actions a, where result(L,a) is the next layer of nodes analyzed from applying action a on L.
• If player(L) = MAX, which means MAX is playing on layer L, then return max(result(L,a)) over all actions a.

Some optimizations will include ordering the tree (e.g. from lowest values on left to highest on right) to make searching for the lowest/highest possible 'score' an easy task. However, the algorithm must choose values that lie between the lower score assigned to the MAX player (who is trying to increase his score) and the higher score assigned to the MIN player (who is trying to decrease his score). This means entire subtrees will be quickly removed, considerably improving time efficiency. This process is called Alpha-Beta pruning.