Conclusion
Phase I was successfully completed thereby meeting the original project goals. The program source code, the program executable, and a video demonstrating the program in action may be obtained from the “Downloads” page. Phase II was begun; however, due to time constraints it was not completed. Therefore, future work may be devoted to four primary areas of the discussed research. The first, to complete Phase II by having the program take input from a “web-cam.” Pre-processing of the image would be necessary to ensure the image is aligned properly. Additionally, color correction would be necessary since the algorithms depend on a constant color palette. Piece detection might need to be tweaked further to account for screen blurring. The second action required is to interface the computer running the program directly to a game controller and allow the program to take complete control of the game. The third area of improvement is to refine the efficiency of the program. One major way this could be accomplished is through the removal of conversion to TIFF, with image processing performed directly on the captured DIB. Finally, before the program is truly viable as a standalone application, the program's AI must be expanded to make it more intelligent.