Semi-related - for those who are interested in writing their own chess programs - the de facto standard method of representing positions (in a human readable fo

Semi-related - for those who are interested in writing their own chess programs - the de facto standard method of representing positions (in a human readable form) is to use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsyth-Edwards_Notation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsyth-Edwards_Notation (FEN). The starting board position in FEN would look something like this: rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1