introduction

I'm a Computer Engineering major at the University of Central Florida. Naturally, being a computer programmer, I have side projects that I've developed over the years. Unfortunately, due to a catastrophic hard drive failure a year ago, I've had to redevelop those projects.

Among these projects are a chess engine, a 3d scripting game/graphics engine, a circuit designing and simulation program (used a genetic algorithm), and a flash game.

chess engine

Blackmail is a WinBoard chess engine. Features include automatic play with a Winboard interface, easy user play using a command prompt and search and analyze a board position.

Features to come include an opening book, end game tablebases, a game database editor, support for the uci protocol (it's generally accepted that this is a better protocol by the experts), and auto personality tuning.

Blackmail uses a custom negascout search algorithm with internal iterative deepening, quiescence search, simple evaluation (including mobility and board control), and some simple pruning. Blackmail's most notable feature is it's very fast move generation and perft testing.

flash game

This flash game will have a description, download and play link soon.

circuit design and simulation

This program would read a circuit size (number of inputs and number of outputs), the expected output for every possible input (such as an addition or multiplication circuit), and use a genetic algorithm to "design" a circuit which meets the requirements. This was also my first multi-threaded and 64-bit specific program at the same time, which worked beautifully. I tested each developed circuit in logisim with perfect results.

3d scripted game/graphics engine

This unnamed game engine used DirectX 11 for Graphics, LUA for scripting, and XML for interface design technology. The purpose of this engine was to completely take graphics programming out of the hands of the game developer.

The game developer may have needed to control 2D objects for interface programming, however 3D graphics rendering was meant to be fully automated. Objects could be moved in a static environment including terrain bitmap rendering, and rendering of the entire scene was automatic as long as the programmer moved objects around.

Also included was complete mouse and keyboard event handling, LUA object-oriented programming (or as close to OOP as possible), and 2D interface event handling.

This project is the next on the list to be started after all of the features of my Chess Engine are finished.

future design

Being a Computer Engineering major and not a Computer Science major, I'm also interested in developing hardware. I may decide to develop a simple microprocessor, a PCI card which does something (plays sound, chess specific processors, etc.), or a robot.

I'm somewhat interested in Computer Vision, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Learning Algorithms. My future projects would probably be included under these categories.