Okay, it's time to work on moves for the last piece: the pawn. Believe it or not, the pawn is the most difficult piece for me to program. It has so many small idiosyncrasies. If you are on the home row, you can go two spaces, but not any other …

Hey everyone! Praise God! Great news! I just passed 1000 subscribers on YouTube and I just wanted to take a minute to thank all of you for taking this journey with me.

It's a bit funny, since I thought that posting the original videos about building Android was a one …

Then why does he say "king me?!" Today I worked on the king moves for picoEngine. Note that I did not include castling moves yet. Without the castle moves, the king is actually one of the easiest pieces to program, as you can see:

string Moves::kingMoves(string boardPositions, int …

In my most recent commit, which you can check out in full at my GitLab, I added the ability for the queen to move to the picoEngine. This completes all of the major/minor pieces of motion, and only leaves the king and pawns to complete (believe it or not …

Believe it or not, the bishops can now move! 3 of the 6 piece types now have the complete freedom of movement that they should have on the regular board! Things seem to be making steady progress, although I still see some issues with kingSafety, so I'll have to work …

Except he's not. That's right. I big technical oversight on my part allowed the king to not be safe at all!

while (boardPositions[k] == '*' && notI) {

Needed to be changed to:

while (boardPositions[k] == '-' && notI) {

That's right! A - is what my board uses for empty spaces. But the Java board I …

Now the rooks can move too!

While it is only a small improvement, the rooks can now also be moved by picoEngine, which is a great step forward. Overall, that leaves 2 of 6 pieces complete for motion, or about 33% complete. Technically, when that is done, the engine will …

Happy New Year everyone!

I've done a lot of posts the last year, and thanks to those of you who read them, like them, follow/subscribe to them as well. Last year I also started a YouTube channel where I do my best to help others learn how to compile …

[gallery ids="3950,3951,3952" type="rectangular"]

I was fortunate enough to be given a used BLU Life XL (L0050UU) from my sister when she upgraded her phone. The great part about having a new toy is getting to build Android for it from scratch, since no one has made …

For the first time ever, picoEngine made it's very own move.

While no where near as important as my children taking their first steps, it was really a monumental moment for me when picoEngine made it's very first move using UCI commands while loaded in Arena. That's right, after several …