Chess is a two-player board game that's been popular as a game of wits since the 15th century. A computer beat the first human player in the 1950s (a complete novice) before one beat the human world champion in 1997. They have since moved on to having superhuman intelligence. One of the main difficulties of writing a chess engine – a computer program that plays chess – is searching through the many variations and combinations and picking the best one.
In this recipe, we'll use Monte Carlo tree search to create a basic chess engine.
Getting ready
We'll use the python-chess library for visualization, to get valid moves, and to know if a state is terminal. We can install it with the pip command, as follows:
pip install python-chess
We'll be using this library for visualization, to generate valid moves at each position, and to check if we've reached a final position.
How to do it...
This recipe is based...
