Erek Speed

Well, it’s been slightly more than a month since I last posted and sadly the reason isn’t that I have little to say just that I have so little time to say it.  I keep a list of things to blog about but I never get around to the interesting things because I’m just trying to talk about the less interesting things which make up the majority of my life.  So, in the interest of that, here’s a recap.

So, the main attraction in my life thus far has been my Software Engineering in JAVA lab, which has decided to consume my life and soul.  The essential goal of the class is to teach us how the design process works, and (in the final project at least) have us demonstrate our skills in a small development team.  I love coding a lot, but working with a team can be a challenge.  I’m easy to get along with in general though, so luckily, no huge problems develop.   This team’s dynamic is decent but it could probably be better.  I’m writing a lot of the core of the game engine and other are doing other things which always seem to take longer than they should.  Since I’ve referenced it already without explaining it, I should probably go ahead and talk about what my project is.

We’re making a program which plays Antichess.  It’s a variant of chess which requires you to lose all your pieces before your opponent does.  To expedite this, all captures are forced.  To make things even more interesting, our specific version still maintains the same checkmate win condition as well.

This means that the computer player I’m currently developing has to be able efficiently lose all her pieces while not being checkmated and trying to checkmate the other person.  It’s an interesting problem indeed. 

The final release is due Monday, and I’ll have a version online at http://web.mit.edu/espeed/www/projects, for you to play with.  For more info now, go here: http://antichess.mit.edu.