Your FPGA Is Better Than You Are At Chess

Yes, your FPGA board can beat you at chess.  At least, that’s the objective of Warren Miller over at All Programmable Planet in his series titled A Chess-Playing FPGA. Warren has been thinking about “developing a different way of thinking about solving complex problems using FPGAs, as opposed to the traditional sequential approach we are trained for when working with processor-oriented designs. Chess gives us an opportunity to jog our brains from that (all too familiar) sequential space into the parallel computation space.”

There are a total of thirteen articles in the series so far, and they offer a fascinating, in-depth look at how FPGA technonogy can be leveraged to tackle a complex set of problems. Warren’s writing is excellent, and his approach is easy to follow along with.  Definitely worth a read!

Here are some links to the series for your perusal:

• A Chess-Playing FPGA: Introduction
• A Chess-Playing FPGA: Architecture Definition
• A Chess-Playing FPGA: Game Theory Quick Start Guide
• A Chess-Playing FPGA: Move Generation
• A Chess-Playing FPGA: Best Move Logic
• A Chess-Playing FPGA: Best Move Logic, Part 2
• A Chess-Playing FPGA: Exception Conditions
• A Chess-Playing FPGA: Exception Conditions, Part 2
• A Chess-Playing FPGA: Peering Into the Future
• A Chess-Playing FPGA: The Evaluation Function
• A Chess-Playing FPGA: The Evaluation Function, Part 2
• A Chess-Playing FPGA: Linking the Move Generator & Evaluation Functions
• A Chess-Playing FPGA: Generating More Moves

Awesome work, Warren!  We look forward to reading the remainder of the series!  So, do you guys have any examples of complex problem-solving that you are working on with your FPGA? Share with us in the comments.

(via All Programmable Planet)