Alexa Chess

Example Proposal

CMSC389L

Colin King

October 29, 2017

Overview

Alexa Chess will be able to compete with you in a game of Chess.
The human player will play on a physical chess board, speaking their moves out loud to Alexa.
- Alexa will process these moves and respond back.

Alexa, open Alexa Chess.

Let's play a game of Chess. Would you like to play as black or white?

White.

Great, then I will play black. What is your first move?

Pawn to D6.

Knight to F3.

...

Queen to B2. Checkmate! Would you like to play again?

The service will be able to support multiple concurrent games, one per Alexa.
A website will show the current game state.
- It will display a 2D chess board with each game piece.
- To simplify development, each game will be associated with an Amazon email account. A user will only need to enter the email on the front-end to see the associated game.

AWS Lambda:
- 2 Lambda functions:
  - Alexa Responses (triggered by Alexa Skill Kit)
  - Chess AI
DynamoDB:
- Stores game states and user data (win/loss record, etc.)
Alexa Skill Kit
API Gateway:
- Exposes an API on top of DynamoDB
S3:
- Hosts HTML and CSS for a website
- Queries API from client-side JS

Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, and S3 all automatically scale to handle changes in load, without needing to provision extra capacity.
- The only concern would be to consider pre-warming these services before major press events that could lead to a severe load spike.
- Unlike the other services used, DynamoDB's auto-scaling is not automatically configured. It can be enabled on a table separately.