A generic chess-like game player

Abstract

Domain-specific languages are programming languages which are targeted towards a specific problem. Domain-specific languages can be used when trying to describe a class of chess-like variants, as they provide a logical notation that can be altered and modified to cater for our problem domain. Various domain-specific languages catering for the description of chess-like variants have been developed in the literature. In this project, we reviewed and evaluated two of these languages which tackled the problem taking different approaches. For this study, we evaluated the strengths of the domain-specific languages by the level of expressivitiy and the level of compactness. The level of expressivity measures how many chess-like game variants can be described using a single domain-specific language. The level of compactness measures the ease of describing a variant without any unneccessary or redundant definitions. One of the domain-specific languages was designed with compactness in mind, while the other was designed to describe a large number of chess variants, thus making distinct goals as the focus of the languages. We developed a domain-specific language trying to address both expressiveness and compactness. Upon investigation, this domain-specific language showed to be more expressive than compact. From the domain-specific language, a game description is generated. A game description is a chess variant which is described through our domain-specific language. This game description contains definitions which make up the chess-variant such as a board and piece definition. Through this description we can generate numerous applications, like a generic chess-like game player, by applying the definitions provided. A generic game player is a specifically designed application able to play a game without any human interaction. The generic game player takes the rules and specifications of the game as an input and returns a player that is capable of evaluating and applying the input specified.