I think it would be really spiffy to have a comprehensive chess database, with a list of all of the games in my various chess books in it. Perhaps a mechanism to recognize current positions, definitely some way of seeing all of the text comments that are relevant, and showing who made what move next.
Another cool thing would be several AI programs, to advise on tactical and strategic data.
The hardest part, I imagine, would be taking general ideas and seeing the
patterns.
Programming Notes
Each piece can be represented in as few as 3 bits
| 000 | Empty |
| 001 | P Pawn |
| 010 | N Knight |
| 011 | B Bishop |
| 100 | R Rook |
| 101 | Q Queen |
| 110 | K King |
If you add another bit to indicate color, that is 4 bits of data. In 64 squares, that would be a total of 256 bits/position, or 32 bytes, or 4 ulongs.