Chess Toolkit

In 2013, I decided to package some of my work as a reusable library, which I dubbed the Chess Toolkit and released under the Apache License. This is a good example of my work.

The Chess Toolkit is about 4,000 source lines of code for the library, 4,000 lines of tests, and 1,000 lines of examples. It also includes a detailed Manual. It is mostly written in C, but includes some yacc, lex and Ruby code. The library is packaged using standard autoconf tools, and the unit tests use GNU Check. Assuming you have a typical GNU software development environment, it should build, test and install with the usual incantation:

./configure; make check; sudo make install

In the Chess Toolkit examples, I have included a sample Ruby Gem, which demonstrates how this library could be used with other programming languages. The Ruby Gem is meant to be an example, and not a final product; but it is both powerful and easy to use. To demonstrate my Chess Toolkit, I have written a simple program using the example Ruby Gem, Rails 4 and jQuery. This demonstration also ties into some of my other work, where I processed millions of chess games, scored them using a unique algorithm of my own invention, and saved the results in a MySQL database. The score for each position equates directly to a shift in the player’s Elo rating; or to put it simply, positive scores are better for white and negative is better for black.

All Chess players should have a hobby.