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Pixelpusher

Nowadays, you can buy many very strong computer programs for your PC. The newest version of Rebel is challenging grandmaster and nearly world-champion Anand. Programs have ELO-ratings, much higher than most of us can even dream to get close to. The Pixelpusher program takes a step in the other direction: it is might well the weakest playing chess program in the world! Pixelpusher namely just makes a random legal move. If you are again beaten up badly by your commercial chess playing program, try Pixelpusher!

Well, this is just my version 0.3 of a chess playing applet. The current version was made by Hans Bodlaender and Eli Bachmupsky.

This only works with Java enabled browsers.

Above, you see an applet in working. It plays a game of chess against you.

  1. To make a move, first (left) click on a piece, and then on its destination square.
  2. To deselect a piece, (left) click again on the selected piece.
  3. To castle, (left) click on the king and then on its destination square. The rook moves automatically with it.
  4. To go back to the original setup, click with the right mouse button on the board. If you have a one-button mouse, click and press the alt or control button at the same time.
  5. The applet checks legality of the moves, including check. It follows the chess moves precisely, except that it does not allow you to promote a piece to something different from a queen, and:
  6. The applet does not determine stalemate or mate, draw by repetition, or draw by the 50 moves rule.

Known bugs

  1. Promotion is automatically to a queen. Minor-promotion is not possible.
  2. The computer plays very bad. It does a 2-ply deep minimax search, but with a rather poor evaluation function.
  3. The computer only plays black.
  4. The current version uses the event model of the JDK 1.1 or 1.2. This means that the applet probably does not run under Netscape 3, and IE 3.
  5. When run under Netscape on a X-windows/Unix running SGI, redrawing the board sometimes is not carried out until the return move is calculated.

Version

This is version 0.3 of the chess playing applet. Versions with somewhat stronger counterplay are planned.

The name

I named it Pixelpusher, after the name `woodpusher' for a chess player that actually do not think when they play a game of chess.

The source code

You can download the source code with all other files needed to run the applet.

Also, you can view the source code.

WWW page by Hans Bodlaender. Programming by Hans Bodlaender and Eli Bachmupsky.
WWW page created: April 23, 1998.