My puzzle-rush bot

This repo contains my OOP implementation of my

Description

A bot coded in Python that plays puzzle rush on chess.com. Puzzle rush is a popular game where the player has to solve as many chess puzzles in exactly 5 minutes as possible. Currently the best humans on the planet perform at about 50 to 55 puzzles.

It performs the following actions:

opens a browser (Firefox)
visits chess.com, removes annoying banners then logs in (you need your own credentials*)
visits the puzzle rush page and clicks "Play"
cracks puzzles one after the other* (sometimes it might fail a problem)
once the 5 minutes countdown elapsed or if game aborted due 3 failures, takes a screenshot of its score and saves it locally in the appropriate folder

Do not forget to include your own chess.com credentials else below method will fail:

class PuzzleRushBot():
    '''The blueprint for the bot that plays puzzle rush'''
    # def __init__(self):
    #     pass # this bot has many methods but does not really require attributes

    def get_credentials(self):
        with open("credentials.txt") as f:
            content = f.readlines()
        creds = [line.strip() for line in content if not "#" in line]
        return creds[0], creds[1]

* Here is how it proceeds to solve puzzles:

It loops over the following workflow:

parses the HTML in order to get which pieces are on which squares (it disregards castling and en passant rights at this stage; I might add this later) => selenium & beautiful soup
processes that information (make a FEN) to convert it to Stockfish lingo => ad hoc functions
passes the position FEN description to the Stockfish neural network, which in turn provides its best move => python-chess and ad hoc functions
this best move is defined as a start and end square, hence pyautogui is used to click on these in order to actually complete the move
repeats till game is over

There were several challenges, including:

removing the annoying banners
find the relevant piece and square data in the HTML and convert that into Stockfish-digestible language
finetune the waiting times so as to maximize speed while preventing any crashes

OS: Windows 10 Launched via Powershell. There is still much room for improvement as this is only a first version.

for example, using WebDriverWait... in selenium would be better than time.sleep() as it i more robust
I noticed that my program is faster at making the first move of each challenge than the remaining moves and cannot understand why yet
-generally speaking, I'm sure the program can be made faster

Files and directories

The main file is obvisouly main.py => just run

python main.py

bot.py contains the class PuzzleRushBot that has all the tailored methods I created
stockfish_13_win_x64_avx2.exe is the chess engine
scores_screenshots is the directory where screenshots of scores are saved

Steps required to install the project

the firefox driver for Selenium (this requires to add Geckodriver to PATH)
the stockfish engine executable (to be placed in the same directory as the main Python file)

pip install -r requirements.txt

Warnings:

you may have to disable manually the cookies-related banner at the bottom of the page else clicks due to happen on the first rank will fail; moreover disable the squares highlighting and legal moves highlighting (else, parsing the HTML may fail.). Leave the coordinates inside board and set animation type to FAST.
The program does not account yet for underpromotions, castling or en passant rights but can still solve most puzzles.
some of the clicks are not robust: while clicking on "Log in" and "Play" buttons is done via selenium (so, it is robust in the sense that it uses the HTML), clicking on the squares while making a move is done via pyautogui, because playing the move by clicking via selenium was too inconvenient. Hence, this program is calibrated for a specific screen size (1920,1080). If your screen size is different, you need to adapt the coordinates of the points that are clicked (the squares) in main.py
you cannot try accelerating the program by reducing the time.sleep() as this will induce "engine process died unexpectedly (exit code: 3221225477)"

Please use this program responsibly and respect chess.com terms of use.

Credits

I obviously did not code a chess engine myself... Kudos to the Stockfish team.