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Welcome to the JavaChessEngine wiki!

This project was my attempt at building a chess engine from scratch, and it is most definitely not the most efficient. At its current state, it can analyse about 4,000 positions a second. At depth 4, it takes about 3-5 minutes to analyse around 2 million positions. For context, modern chess engines such as stockfish analyse about 4,000,000 positions a second.

The board is represented in a Game class that stores the board as Piece[][]. It stores other information about the game such as En Passant, Castling Rights and Move Clocks. Having a 2D Piece array as the board definitely adds overhead for accessing, but it allowed me an easier representation for calculating positions. Methods such as bitboards or 0x88 representations are faster. The following breakdown how the array matches up with a typical chess board, where the rank numbers was aligned to the array indices.

 Typical Chess Board
 * Black
 [A8][B8][C8][D8][E8][F8][G8][H8]
 [A7][B7][C7][D7][E7][F7][G7][H7]
 [A6][B6][C6][D6][E6][F6][G6][H6]
 [A5][B5][C5][D5][E5][F5][G5][H5]
 [A4][B4][C4][D4][E4][F4][G4][H4]
 [A3][B3][C3][D3][E3][F3][G3][H3]
 [A2][B2][C2][D2][E2][F2][G2][H2] 
 [A1][B1][C1][D1][E1][F1][G1][H1]
 * White
 * 

 ARRAY REFERENCE TABLE
 * WHITE
 [A1][B1][C1][D1][E1][F1][G1][H1]
 [A2][B2][C2][D2][E2][F2][G2][H2]
 [A3][B3][C3][D3][E3][F3][G3][H3] 
 [A4][B4][C4][D4][E4][F4][G4][H4]
 [A5][B5][C5][D5][E5][F5][G5][H5]
 [A6][B6][C6][D6][E6][F6][G6][H6]
 [A7][B7][C7][D7][E7][F7][G7][H7] 
 [A8][B8][C8][D8][E8][F8][G8][H8]
 * BLACK
 * 
WHITE
[0,0][1,0][2,0][3,0][4,0][5,0][6,0][7,0]
[0,1][1,1][2,1][3,1][4,1][5,1][6,1][7,1]
[0,2][1,2][2,2][3,2][4,2][5,2][6,2][7,2]
[0,3][1,3][2,3][3,3][4,3][5,3][6,3][7,3]
[0,4][1,4][2,4][3,4][4,4][5,4][6,4][7,4]
[0,5][1,5][2,5][3,5][4,5][5,5][6,5][7,5]
[0,6][1,6][2,6][3,6][4,6][5,6][6,6][7,6]
[0,7][1,7][2,7][3,7][4,7][5,7][6,7][7,7]
BLACK

A File = [0,y]      B File = [1,y]
C File = [2,y]      D File = [3,y]
E File = [4,y]      F File = [5,y]
G File = [6,y]      H File = [7,y]

1st Rank = [x,0]    2nd Rank = [x,1]
3rd Rank = [x,2]    4th Rank = [x,3]
5th Rank = [x,4]    6th Rank = [x,5]
7th Rank = [x,6]    8th Rank = [x,7]