Monthly Archives: February 2009

I have a penchant for strategy games but, I am unlucky enough to be horribly bad at them. Take chess for example, I love to play but readily get creamed because I sometimes fail to take into account all of the advanced intricacies like key squares, en passant, castleing and changing point values for advancing pawns. The biggest problem comes from my inability to see more than a move or too into the future. That visualization is probably the hardest part for most beginning chess players. Enter Thinking Machine 4 . It’s a Java applet utilizing Processing, an OpenGL style language used primarily for visualizing data. Thinking Machine is designed to have the intelligence of the average chess player so it doesn’t offer anything interesting on the playing front (unless you’re below average like me in which case it’s always a challenge). Its true power lies in its decision making ability. Before moving a piece, Thinking Machine draws every possible move and counter move for both players based on the current board positions. Green lines represent white moves and orange lines represent those beloning to black. The deeper the hue of a move the more likely it is to occur. Once all possible moves have been drawn, Thinking Machine makes its final decision. I have yet to beat Thinking Machine (which isn’t saying much) but it’s interesting to watch the thought process of a decent chess player from the most basic opening move to the more advanced end game.