Occasionally, I do a theme, or idea, on a given day for a period of time. Currently, I have been spending quite a bit of time working on chess engines and their play. So, I am going to create a "Fool's Mate Friday" post. That's right, every Friday, I'll be …

Typically, if we want to check the internet connection speed, we can just use a web browser with any of the usual internet speed test sites. However, the other day I actually needed to test the internet connection speed on a machine without using a browser.

In this case the …

For better or worse, I added the ability to castle to the Beginner Chess Engine.

In theory, that would always be better. However, adding this feature actually caused two problems:

Problem #1 - Even though the castle works great, as expected, and is successful, occasionally, on the NEXT move of the …

If you've been following along, you probably have seen that the king had a slight problem. It was failing to adequately check for pawns when considering it's own safety.

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Here you can see the commit where I fixed the code. Now it will accurately …

Well, if you were wondering what I was doing with my spare time, this is it!

I just added a TextView to display the move options that the computer had available. Not real fancy, but it allows me to "watch" what's going on without the debugger running. You can check …

As you can see, I added a reset button to the app for the Beginning Chess Engine.

Originally, I had intended to have the board simply reset back to the starting position. However, for some odd reason, when I would reset the board pieces, odd things would happen....

Like a …

The beginner chess engine has a brand new repository so I can more accurately track issues. Before, it was a small part of a larger repository holding different programs, but I have so many issues that I wasn't to track, that it became difficult to use in that manner.

So …

The trouble with knights....

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In the continuing saga of making my own chess engine for Android, I've run into a peculiarity: If the king is in check, and the only move is a knight to capture the enemy to save the king …

As I continue to work on my java chess engine for Android, I've decided on a name for it, "beginner chess engine". I just posted the latest commits here:

https://github.com/alaskalinuxuser/apps_small/commit/cda1b197c7d48b71f45b6ce001cfa6a9482a1ba0

It's not quite finished yet, and still needs more adjusting, changing, and tweaking. A …

Most people who are placing their apps on the Google Play Store are already aware of the Android version of the Play Console App. It's an app to monitor the distribution of your apps. At first I was a bit skeptical of why I would need this tool, but I …