https://getupdated.tech/ Practical AI updates, tool explainers, and career guidance for students and early-career builders. en-IN Copyright 2026 GetUp. All rights reserved. contact.us.GetUp@gmail.com (GetUp) contact.us.GetUp@gmail.com (GetUp) Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0530 Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0530 https://getupdated.tech/images/favicon.jpg https://getupdated.tech/ https://getupdated.tech/blogs/bitboards-explained-representing-a-chess-board-in-64-bits.html https://getupdated.tech/blogs/bitboards-explained-representing-a-chess-board-in-64-bits.html A chess board has 64 squares; a Java long has 64 bits. The explanation I wish I'd had — why engines switch from arrays to bitboards, the bitwise tricks, move generation, and the bugs that taught me how they really work. Vijay Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0530 Engineering https://getupdated.tech/blogs/generating-sliding-piece-moves-without-magic-bitboards.html https://getupdated.tech/blogs/generating-sliding-piece-moves-without-magic-bitboards.html Every resource jumped straight to magic bitboards. I skipped them and wrote the plain ray-walking generator instead — the direction arrays, the blocker logic, the bugs that ate two weekends, and why correctness beats clever optimisation. Vijay Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0530 Engineering https://getupdated.tech/blogs/magic-bitboards-in-java-what-finally-made-them-click.html https://getupdated.tech/blogs/magic-bitboards-in-java-what-finally-made-them-click.html I closed the tab the first time I read about magic bitboards. Months later the same page made sense. The intuition behind occupancy masks and blockers, concise Java code, and every bug that cost me an evening. Vijay Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0530 Engineering https://getupdated.tech/blogs/perft-testing-how-i-found-4-move-generation-bugs-in-one-afternoon.html https://getupdated.tech/blogs/perft-testing-how-i-found-4-move-generation-bugs-in-one-afternoon.html My engine played legal-looking chess, and legal-looking is not legal. Perft gave me a number that was either right or wrong, and perft divide told me exactly where the en passant, castling, promotion and file-wrapping bugs were hiding. Vijay Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0530 Engineering https://getupdated.tech/blogs/handling-en-passant-castling-rights-and-the-50-move-rule-correctly.html https://getupdated.tech/blogs/handling-en-passant-castling-rights-and-the-50-move-rule-correctly.html Three rules every tutorial hand-waves. They are not hard to understand, they are hard to get right, because none of them live on the board. A stale en passant square, rights that outlived a captured rook, and a clock counting the wrong thing. Vijay Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0530 Engineering https://getupdated.tech/blogs/minimax-to-alpha-beta-measuring-the-actual-node-reduction.html https://getupdated.tech/blogs/minimax-to-alpha-beta-measuring-the-actual-node-reduction.html A correct move generator still plays random chess. So I wrote minimax, added alpha-beta, and counted every node instead of trusting the textbook square root. Move ordering turned out to do almost nothing from the start position and almost everything in a real midgame. Vijay Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0530 Engineering https://getupdated.tech/blogs/why-i-built-a-chess-engine-in-java-instead-of-a-crud-app.html https://getupdated.tech/blogs/why-i-built-a-chess-engine-in-java-instead-of-a-crud-app.html After a stack of Todo apps and inventory systems, I built a chess engine in Java. The design decisions, the minimax and alpha-beta code, the brutal bugs, and what a genuinely hard project actually teaches you. Vijay Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0530 Engineering https://getupdated.tech/blogs/writing-a-chess-evaluation-function-material-piece-square-tables-mobility.html https://getupdated.tech/blogs/writing-a-chess-evaluation-function-material-piece-square-tables-mobility.html A correct search that only counts material shuffles rooks, refuses to castle and parks knights on the rim. Piece values, 64 numbers per piece type, a midgame-to-endgame taper, a mobility term, and the symmetry test that caught three bugs in one assertion. Vijay Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0530 Engineering https://getupdated.tech/blogs/implementing-the-uci-protocol-in-plain-java.html https://getupdated.tech/blogs/implementing-the-uci-protocol-in-plain-java.html Move generation, search and evaluation all worked, and Arena still showed the engine as not responding. The handshake, the position and go parsers, the worker thread that keeps stop readable, and the missing flush that lost a game on time. Vijay Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0530 Engineering