A friend of mine came to me with a question: which squares in chess see the most action? He is planning on creating an art project using maps of famous battles for each different square, and he wanted to make some association between the nature of the different battles, and the nature of captures on the chess board.
This software plays through a series of chess games, parses them, moves the pieces, and counts the number of captures on each square. It would not be hard to extend it to count the number of captures by each class of piece, or the number of each class of piece captured on a given square. Another suggestion was to count the point values captured per square. It does properly deal with "ambiguous" moves where more than one piece of the same type could move to the square. It also handles pawn promotions.
d4: 186853 d5: 183439 e5: 122170 e4: 109805 c4: 86602 c5: 84519 f6: 80993 c3: 79177 c6: 66146 f5: 62814 b5: 56940 f4: 56303 f3: 54621 e6: 50485 d6: 49113 b4: 46222 g5: 43879 g4: 38557 d3: 34350 e3: 33908 e7: 33429 g6: 32557 b3: 29923 d7: 29320 b6: 28250 d8: 27341 d2: 27282 g3: 25827 g7: 25187 a4: 23604 f7: 23384 b7: 23140 d1: 22837 b2: 22447 g2: 21660 e2: 21056 a5: 20705 a6: 19772 h5: 19146 c8: 17905 h4: 17049 h6: 16833 f2: 16596 c7: 15152 e8: 15063 c2: 14648 c1: 14592 f8: 14153 a3: 13940 a7: 13355 a2: 13240 e1: 13194 f1: 11824 h3: 11696 h7: 10736 a8: 9795 a1: 7642 h2: 7447 b8: 6188 b1: 5068 h8: 3056 g8: 2764 h1: 2469 g1: 2455