I have several ideas for computer programs that would be trivially easy to program for a competent programmer (unfortunately, I am not that. I can hack together simple things, but all of these ideas would be just out of my reach, unfortunately) but incredibly useful for beginners or people that just want to sharpen their chess muscles (is that a mixed metaphor? chess swords???).

I will probably list some more, but the easiest one I know of to implement would be just this:

Make a one window program, with a chess board, nothing else. Hook it to a database of games and have it display a random position from a random game. Your job is just to quickly click on every undefended piece (options to include undefended pawns?). Not hanging pieces that can be taken, just a piece with no support. Maybe there could be options to find hanging pieces, but of course random positions wouldn't be sufficient for that. But anyway, maybe there could be options for session length or whatever, but have it be speed based, so as soon as you've clicked on every undefended piece in the position, it instantly flashes another position on the board and you repeat.

I'd say a session of 100 positions would be pretty reasonable. It could then track your time and accuracy over time.

Now, obviously this only focuses on one thing, but it speeds up that one thing considerably, and also I think helps make it second nature spotting things like that (they are so important in tactics). One of my teachers tells me in his mind, undefended pieces almost glow. I'd love for that to happen naturally.

One of the attractive things about such a problem is it seems like a good programmer could have this running flawlessly in an hour or so. Maybe I'm wrong.

What do you guys think? I have tons of little ideas like this. Maybe someone is interested in making them happen, or maybe we could just gather more ideas to collect dust?

Sorry, my memory stinks when it comes to details. Somebody posted a link some time ago for a tactic site which had something resembling what your after. I remember passing five minutes on the thing. Maybe somebody with more than my one brain cell can remember better..

Here is the "link"
http://chesstempo.com/
Master Greg

Yeah, I really don't think chesstempo has much in common with what I suggested above.

I don't have the software, but I think the newest Fritz programs have this as a training drill.

Well, the entire point is that it is simple to program and would be free. I wouldn't mind inspecting this in Fritz, though. Can you show me what you are talking about? I haven't ever heard of anything like that within Fritz or Chess Base. I've also used past versions and looked pretty extensively through the features lists of the newer versions and not seen anything like that.

I couldn't find the original article, but here's a streaming video from Chessbase regarding the "visualization" training features.

http://www.cblivestreams.de/cbw2009_1108

I guess it has attack (where you note which pieces are attacked), defend (where you note which pieces are defended), and check (where you find the checks) training. It seems to be very similar to what you mention and if it's already set up within this program, why reinvent the wheel. I actually couldn't watch the video because I'm at work, so let me know what you think.

Best regards,
Bryan aka backrankbrawler

That's nothing like what I'm suggesting. I've seen that.

What am I suggesting is rapidly display hundreds of positions. In each one, you merely click on the pieces that are undefended. YOU have to click on the undefended pieces (to practice spotting them quickly and reinforce their importance so that you notice them without thinking). I'm not talking about any automated help features, I'm talking about a simple task that can help harden your underlying fundamentals of position assessment and tactics (and the speed in which you handle it).

The program I'm talking about needs to do these things:
1) Display a random position from a database.
2) Wait on you to click on each undefended piece, quickly.
3) When finished clicking on all of the undefended pieces, the program instanly displays the next random position.
4) Track your accuracy and time over a set of problems and their progress.

I'm reasonably certain there is nothing out there that does this. The whole point of this thread is generating new ideas that even a reasonably competent programmer could write in short order, not trying to find existing software which does something remotely similar.

Maybe this is just a bad idea, I don't know, but it seems good to me.

It doesn't sound like a bad idea, but the Fritz training functions do seem similar, although somewhat different...you see the position, and then you have to click on the pieces that are attacked or defended (depending on which mode you choose). Your response is timed or you have a time limit. Did you watch the whole video link? Or maybe I sent the wrong one.

It is different, but I think they train similar attributes that you speak of. In any case, I don't see what this would be too difficult to do (although I'm not a programmer). In any case, it seems my comments have not been very helpful, in which case I apologize.

Actually, I should apologize, that was a different video than I thought it was. It is somewhat similar to the idea, but not quite. The big problem here is that it isn't free. Of course it would be silly to pay the hundreds of dollars for Fritz for something like that.

I wonder if we could get someone to throw something like what I'm suggesting or like what Fritz has here together. At least I feel better seeing that someone has had a similar idea to what I'm having. A free version of that would be extremely simple and I think very helpful to a lot of people. And, importantly, not difficult to code.

Again, sorry. It was my mistake, I thought you had linked to a different video.

Out of curiosity, have you ever done any coding? What you want is a fairly large project. You would need some sort of GUI (for the board, pieces, and clicking), the logic to calculate all of the legal moves (to find out which pieces are defended), some sort of pgn parser to find random positions, plus whatever storage system to keep track of positions that had been done, scores, times, etc.

It would take a good programmer a few weeks to do something like that, so unless you're going to do it for your own edification (or if you have open source software to work with), it's probably going to cost you several hundred dollars to get someone to build it for you. Fritz would ultimately be cheaper because they can amortize the cost of development over thousands of users.

Yes, I have, and I disagree it would take a few weeks. The deal is that I can *almost* do it. It doesn't take much of a GUI. A chessboard that you can click to highlight squares takes minutes to create. There are all sorts of free libraries for parsing PGNs or even loading FENs from a PGN out there as well as logic to calculate the undefended pieces. It's just a matter of putting it together. I'm not asking for someone to do this, I just think it would be a good idea to have some ideas for people that want to tackle these kinds of projects for free.

I know I would do it for free if I had the ability. I know others would, too (look at SCID). I'm not begging here, I'm just trying to contribute some ideas that are easy and beneficial.