After resisting the temptation for years, I spent several weeks this summer writing a chess program. The program's name is Kirby, and at the moment it's nothing more than a (very slow) move generator, a basic alpha-beta search and a (very crude) evaluation. But it plays legal chess, albeit quite slowly and very badly. (See below for a crushing loss to Crafty-23.3!)
I decided to start from scratch---for example, I use a 12x12 array for board representation
---and it has been a blast. Not sure if/when I'll have time to do more, but I've really enjoyed the project so far. And it's nice to know that I won't be seeing any polls asking who thinks Kirby is a clone/derivative!
