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Shallow Thought

Demonstration of a chess playing engine in Angular 15. Please see here for an in-depth discussion of the code.

Introduction

This is a bit of fun to show some Angular concepts PLUS a chess engine - all in one package. In homage to 'Deep Thought' (the granddaddy of chess engines) and in honest recognition of my engine's feeble playing strength, I have named it Shallow Thought. I hope you enjoy playing around with it as much as I enjoyed building it.

Since this is primarily a learning exercise, it's accompanied by a series of articles that will hopefully explain what's happening (see link above).

Here's a screenshot showing Shallow Thought (Black) getting pounded by Houdini (White)!

Shallow Thought game screenshot

Disclaimer

This is my first serious attempt at using Angular 15. Coming from a Visual Studio background, this project was also my first use of the following:

  • Node.js
  • Npm
  • Webpack
  • Git
  • RxJS
  • Web workers (i.e. browser background threads)

I hope it's clear: this is not a masterclass in any of the above (or in writing chess engines, for that matter). Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Building

To run the app follow these steps:

  1. Make sure you have a recent version of Node.js/npm installed.
  2. Download the master branch as a zip file from GitHub.
  3. Extract it to a local folder.
  4. Start a Node.js command prompt.
  5. Switch to the 'shallow-thought' folder (the one that has /src as a sub-folder).
  6. run npm install and let it finish.
  7. run npm start and wait for it to show "compiled successfully."
  8. Open http://localhost:4200 in a browser (I find that Microsoft Edge gives the best performance).
  9. You play white and the computer plays black. Click on a white piece and then click on the square to which you want to move it.