Introduction
I grew up playing Chinese chess with my father as well as a physical chess computer program he bought me during the time of Windows 98 came out. Here is a picture below, a one of a kind physical Chinese chess computer with 32k memory and 16000 moves, with 20 max depth search. I was only able to beat Master level once at the age of ten, but I am only an intermediate player.
The lights on the top and bottom will light up indicating where on the board the computer wants to move and you use tactile sensors to press down on the start and end position to finalize a move. Thus, I was man vs machine ever since a child. Fast track 16 years, and the team from "openAI" beat the world champion in the game of Go, making history of machine overcoming human intelligence. During the Hacktoberfest I found no sign of such chess programs, but I did come across the "cchess-zero" repo, which is an attempt to implement alpha zero like chess into Chinese chess. There have been attempts to remake Alpha zero in the form of Leela chess being the most popular, none made in Chinese chess I have come across. The problem with this repository is its all written in Chinese and I am very slow at reading Chinese and only understanding partially. I wanted to incorporate this opportunity with Hacktoberfest and the fact that the repository is under the MIT license, I want to make non-Chinese speaking individuals to access this resource as well and learn from it. Thus I created an issue for it.
Translation
Thus, I took the liberty to translate as much of the two papers and source code to English while maintaining the Chinese text. I also fixed the broken links as well as the images that are not showing up on Github. The author mentioned that he doesn't get why the local images are not showing up in markdown, but I know the answer and fixed it. Since the author has limited knowledge in English as mentioned on his paper, I tried to also translate my pull request as well as what I am trying to do in Chinese as well. With the help on powerful Chinese to English translators I was able to translate over 600 lines/paragraphs of text in the pull-request. In the author's original README, he encourages others to share the repository, so it makes sense that being in a popular language such as English will receive more views.
Hacktoberfest
This issue was self created and not part of Hacktoberfest, so I also did a Hacktoberfest approved translation work on Microsoft's repository at https://github.com/microsoft/Data-Science-For-Beginners with issue and pull request. This was a quick translation work for a README for Data Science tutorial, so it is what it is.
Thoughts on This Experience
Overall, the Hacktoberfest is a great way to get real world experience and build confidence in working on other people's code, while respecting the rules and courtesy that you need to show as a representative of Seneca College. The fact that it is run every year despite the fake pull requests people try to do, means it is valuable to the Open Source communities, to first timers, to veterans, to train future developers. If I were to do this again, I would have tried to do more issues in parallel as I have more than two repositories that didn't make it to the four pull requests this month. The amount you get out of it is how much time and effort you put into it.
Aside
Here is a bonus game between world champion Magnus Calsen (age 8 simulated) and me (NeoLinux) at age 29.
You can checkout the English Translation version of Chinese Chess Alpha Zero:
https://github.com/ycechungAI/cchess-zero
Thanks for Reading,
Eugene Chung
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