Question

I am trying to make a 2 player chess program with a GUI in wxPython that is able to validate moves and follow every chess rule.

Right now, I am at the beginning of my design and figuring out which board representation technique I should use. I recently thought the obvious, two dimensional array, but then I read about the 0x88 board representation that is supposedly faster in terms of lookups and logically checks if the square is inside the chessboard or not. But, if I make a program without AI, there is no need to check if someone has moved a move that is outside of the board.

Is there any other advantages with the 0x88 representation that I’m not aware of and which one would you recommend , the 8×8 approach or 0x88. Also, would it be easy to first use a 8×8 representation , and then later, maybe if I decide to add AI, use the 0x88 one ?
Thank you very much for your thoughts.

Answer 1

I agree with you that if you’re not doing AI, there’s not a lot of reason to micro-optimize like that.

One suggestion that I would make is that if you’re considering switching from 8×8 to 0x88 (and in general, for good code quality) is that you should abstract out as much of the board access logic as possible into functions. For example, write and use a

getPieceAtLocation(char file, int rank)

and call

Piece p = getPieceAtLocation('e', 2);

or something along those lines. That way, if you decide to change your mind, you just need to re-write the logic in getPieceAtLocation rather than changing every place where you have to use it.