The ChessAIThon project (2025-1-ES01-KA220-VET-000354329) is co-funded by the European Union. The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Spanish Service for the Internationalisation of Education (SEPIE). Neither the European Union nor the National Agency SEPIE can be held responsible for them.

Chess data: formats structures and dataset files, control version

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Part 1

The automated conversion between chess formats, including matrix (or array) representation to FEN (Forsyth-Edwards Notation) and move generation, is an excellent topic for a high school computer science or mathematics project.

Understanding Matrix Representation

Introduce this concept by explaining that computers need standardized formats to "understand" a chess position. We assume students know how to use FEN; now they have to understand the different approaches of matrix representation because this is the simplest representation for a computer, treating the chessboard as an 8x8 array.

  • Each element in the array holds a value corresponding to a piece (e.g., 'p' for black pawn, 'K' for white king, '0' for empty).
  • Students create an array to model a position—this reinforces data structure concepts.