Generate Chess960 starting position

Revision as of 07:21, 1 May 2014 by Grondilu (talk | contribs) (new draft)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Chess960 is a variant of chess created by world champion Bobby Fisher. Unlike other variant of the game, Chess960 does not require a different material, but instead relies on a random initial position, with a few constraints:

  • as in the standard chess game, all height pawns must be placed on the second rank.
  • pieces must stand on the first rank as in the standard game, in random column order but with the two following constraints:
    • the bishops must be placed on opposite color squares ;
    • the King must be between two rooks ;
Generate Chess960 starting position is a draft programming task. It is not yet considered ready to be promoted as a complete task, for reasons that should be found in its talk page.

With those constraints there are 960 possible starting positions, thus the name of the variant.

The purpose of this task is to write a program that randomly generates a Chess960 initial position. You will show the result as the first rank displayed with Chess symbols in Unicode.

Perl 6

<lang perl6>my Set $squares = set ^8;

$squares = $squares (-) set my @knights = $squares.pick(2); $squares = $squares (-) set my @bishops = $squares.list.grep(* % 2).pick, $squares.list.grep(* %% 2).pick; $squares = $squares (-) set my $queen = $squares.pick; my ($king, @rooks) = $squares.list[1, 0, 2];

my @squares;

@squares[$king, $queen, @rooks, @bishops, @knights] =

< ♔ ♕ ♖ ♖ ♗ ♗ ♘ ♘ >;

say @squares;</lang>

Output:
♗ ♖ ♔ ♕ ♘ ♗ ♖ ♘