Stuart Spence Blog

Computer scientist and educator. Creator of ChessCraft. Senior scientific programmer at Environment Canada.


Sat 15 February 2020

Release 1.5: Achievements

Posted by Stuart Spence in ChessCraft   

So I'm told (by many of you) that achievements are a critical element of mobile games. Well here we go! I thought I'd get started with these two:

  • using at most two seconds every turn to win.
  • using at most three minutes to win.

The stars on the badge indicate …

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Sat 18 May 2019

Centennial? Centeninstallial?

Posted by Stuart Spence in ChessCraft   

100 installs banner

Today ChessCraft passed 100 active installs! That is, 100 people decided to install ChessCraft and (most importantly) did not decide to uninstall it. So that's quite nice. This makes ChessCraft the most popular game I've ever made. Except if we count Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 multiplayer maps I made …

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Fri 29 March 2019

ChessCraft in Universities?

Posted by Stuart Spence in ChessCraft   

There is a possibility that ChessCraft will be used to teach artificial intelligence in a university course! My commandline interface already supports round robin tournaments, and a professor expressed some interest today. It occurred to me that if I prepare a package, lots of AI professors could use it. And …

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Sat 01 July 2017

Your Perfect Code Might Be Terrible for Teaching

Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog   

When I post tutorial videos people often make suggestions on how to improve my computer code. Thank you for your code suggestions! However, we may have a problem.

I often find that code suggestions are not teaching suggestions. Almost all computer programmers are not experienced educators, so this is understandable …

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