My new GPL'd Chess Training SW

Well, in my desire to give something back to the RHP community, I've put together some training software and made it available via Java Web Start at http://www.kerr-kappe.com/chess

Depending on what Russ says, I may take off some of the promo's for RHP, but the program itself will pretty much stay the same.

What is it? It teaches chess visualization by drilling you on

1) Remembering what color a particular square is.
2) Being able to tell if two squares are the same color.
3) Being able to tell if two (or three) squares are on the same diagonal.
4) Being able to tell if two squares are a knight move apart.
5) Being able to tell if two squares are two knight moves apart.
6) Being able to tell if a simple position is checkmate (e.g. Black Kh1, Be3, White Kg3, Re1? Answer: no. Be3-g1 blocks.
7) Letting you play against a weak chess program (called Vince 😛) and allowing you to lag the display (board shows the position 0-7 ply ago) and/or blocking out 0-4 quadrants of the board. Vince is weak, so you should beat him like a drum.

Has online help. Please try it and tell me what you think. I will work on cleaning up the code and releasing it ASAP.

DJK

Looked good to me. I'm not going to say it's the most fun way of improving your chess but I've heard this sort of exercise is very useful if you're serious about improving.

On a java note I've written a few apps myself and it looked pretty good to me although I might not use that tabbed pane to swap between parts of the program. At some point I got a message telling me which exception I'd caused. That wouldn't be so useful to someone who isn't a computer geek.

Thanks and respect for GPL'ing it.

Originally posted by BadBishop

On a java note I've written a few apps myself and it looked pretty good to me although I might not use that tabbed pane to swap between parts of the program. At some point I got a message telling me which exception I'd caused. That wouldn't be so useful to someone who isn't a computer geek.

Exactly, it's good to be able to follow stuff in your head but actually doing the exercises isn't the fun part.

Some sort of wizard set up might work out ok where you can move forwards and backwards through the exercises. Maybe also jump to the one you want by menu?

Sweet.

Standard algebraic would be nice for the chess opponent, but otherwise this is a pretty good training tool. I could see adding in a mate in one drill too.

Nice work.

Originally posted by dscp
Sweet.

Standard algebraic would be nice for the chess opponent, but otherwise this is a pretty good training tool. I could see adding in a mate in one drill too.

Nice work.

perhaps you should anounce all this in the developpers forum?
th

Originally posted by dkappe
Well, in my desire to give something back to the RHP community, I've put together some training software and made it available via Java Web Start at http://www.kerr-kappe.com/chess

Depending on what Russ says, I may take off some of the promo's for RHP, but the program itself will pretty much stay the same.

What is it? It teaches chess visualization b ...[text shortened]... and tell me what you think. I will work on cleaning up the code and releasing it ASAP.

DJK

It sounds interesting, but I couldn't launch it (using either Opera 7 or Netscape 7.1, and I do have java) so I saved the jar file and tried to run it with the recommended command line: "java -jar cvt.jar" but got the following error messages:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: WHITE
at com.imaginot.swing.Splash.showSplash(Splash.java:45)
at com.imaginot.chess.ChessVisualizationTrainer.Main(ChessVisualizationTrainer.java:68)

Originally posted by prn
It sounds interesting, but I couldn't launch it (using either Opera 7 or Netscape 7.1, and I do have java) so I saved the jar file and tried to run it with the recommended command line: "java -jar cvt.jar" but got the following error messages:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: WHITE
at com.imaginot.swing.Splash.show ...[text shortened]... .ChessVisualizationTrainer.Main(ChessVisualizationTrainer.java:68)

Regards,
Paul

Originally posted by thire
perhaps you should anounce all this in the developpers forum?
th

Originally posted by SirLoseALot
I think that forum got deleted........

Originally posted by dkappe
Wierd. Which version of the JVM are you using?

java version "1.3.1_02"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.3.1_02-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.3.1_02-b02, mixed mode)

Originally posted by prn
java -version produces

java version "1.3.1_02"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.3.1_02-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.3.1_02-b02, mixed mode)

Do I need a more recent one?
Paul

Originally posted by prn
java -version produces

java version "1.3.1_02"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.3.1_02-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.3.1_02-b02, mixed mode)

Do I need a more recent one?
Paul