Okay, I seem to be pretty good at these little concepts that hover right between the "coding snack / coding lunch" line.
This one at stage 1 seems simple enough, and then the implications get a little hard. So it's a useful discussion, though Mouser can move it to Developer Corner if he wants.
The idea is just a chess "legal move generator". At snack level it purposely doesn't care about the moves. It just takes a new game and cranks out a list of moves (important to be savable and printable!) So then you can make one of the moves, and hit "go"' again, and it then runs the new legal moves from there. Not all that hard is it?
I forsee a bit of time could disappear into GUI. But there's resources out there, and I can't imagine any run of the mill board set being all that hard to use.
The purpose of it is theoretically (above the snack level) to run all the moves *one ply depth increasing* at a time through some chess engine. It "simulates" my/someone's style of play as a patzer. So for example presuming I am "chess awake" I can stop most (but not all!) 2 mover combos. But then I fall off a cliff! So at 1 ply, my move looks fine, 3 ply looks fine, running on "intuition" etc. But then I am noticing about 5 ply a *lot* of the moves crash because of something that's "not in my head".
So I'd like some thoughts if the first part sounds snacky enough. I am content that later I'd probably have to commission the "1 engine step" as some kind of plugin to an existing engine. Edit: It works best as "1-Click" (Sorry Jeff Bezos!), aka just click on the piece and watch the move list appear, rather than keep having to click "go". Additional fun would be generating say a 5 ply move list deep all at once, then you click a piece for his reply to "prune" the whole tree. So okay, I am just having fun! But in the world of things, all this isn't "that hard". I just love feature creep! : )
