This project was originally written for Bart Massey's CS542 class on adversarial search in the Spring 2007 term at Portland State University.

MiniChess is a chess variant played on a 5 X 6 board. Each side only has one of each piece and five pawns. Because of the reduced size of the game it becomes a little easier for a computer to consider the number of moves available.

This MiniChess player, written in Java, uses many of the standard tricks for larger chess AIs including a negamax search with the beginings of an advanced board evaluator.

The more time that you allow the program to think between moves, the better it does. Since it is in Java, it is not quite as fast as other programs might be, but in general it can search ahead roughly 3 - 4 full plys within 10 seconds.