So uhhhh, a lot of people want this game to have ai huh...

This wasn't entirely unexpected to be honest, with no online support and no ai the current version of the game requires you play with someone local. Which is frequently not possible when browsing Itch.io.

So why didn't this have ai at launch?
Its pretty simple really, I had no idea how to implement that. Previously my games have gotten around the ai problem by focusing on the player's interactions, allowing for incredibly stupid ai to still feel engaging. This probably isn't possible with 1dchess, unless the game is redesigned to be single play an ai would require enough brains to appear to know what it's doing, luckily 1dchess is based off of a far older, far more complex game, and attempts to make an ai for that game have existed as long as computers.

I am aware that i will be limited a great deal as to the scope of this ai, partially due to pico-8's restrictions and partly due to my own lack of experience with this kind of problem, but it should be feasible to run a minmax type ai, though its unlikely to dive very deep.

Step 1: I am attempting to make an ai that will play entirely randomly, so that I can get the needed infrastructure in place to support the more complex methods
Step 2: Try and make a function which can evaluate any board

Step 3: Make a function which can predict possible next moves and feed them into the function from step 2

If nothing else, this should be an interesting learning opportunity.
If you have any sage advice on the matter please feel free to sound off in the comments