Program owners

IDU Class 2018-2019 Polytech Annecy-Chambéry, France

BALLAZ Corentin : Corentin.Ballaz@etu.univ-savoie.fr BURILLON William : William.Burillon@etu.univ-savoie.fr HENAFF Théo : Theo.Henaff@etu.univ-savoie.fr MARITON Tanguy : Tanguy.Mariton@etu.univ-savoie.fr

PolyChess

PolyChess is a Chess engine written in Python and used as practicals for a course on project management at the engineering school Polytech Annecy-Chambéry.

The aim of this repository is not to provide any complete Chess engine since students have to do it based on python-chess. As a consequence, persons interested in this project should check the different forks.

The required features for PolyChess are:

PolyChess is able to play against a user, or to play against itself (through UCI and Winboard on Windows, or Arena on Mac)
The games played are stored in PGN format in a directory games, the PGN headers have to be filled
PolyChess can render the board either in text (on the console) or in SVG (thanks to python-chess, in Jupyter Notebooks)
PolyChess has an opening book (first as a Polyglot book, then using your own format)
PolyChess is able to play on Lichess (and eventually FICS)
PolyChess is modular, it is then easy to isolate a feature and to modify it
PolyChess has an AI (easy to modify) that could play for the engine
It is possible to enter a FEN position and obtain an evaluation from PolyChess

Milestones for the project

Milestone 1:

PolyChess is able to play against user or another engine through UCI, has an opening book and an AI

Milestone 2:

PolyChess plays on Lichess (and FICS)

Milestone 3:

Board representation and legal moves are no longer provided by python-chess but are students' responsibilities

New techniques/skills/terms to get acquainted with

Chess (maybe)
Universal Chess Interface (UCI) (http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/UCIProtocol.html)
Portable General Notation (PGN)
Board representation (bitboards, 0x88, 120-square representation, 64-square representation)
MinMax (Negamax)
Alpha-Beta pruning
Chess rules (five fold repetition, seventy-five moves)
Opening book (Polyglot)
Forsyth-Edwards Notation (FEN) (https://www.chessprogramming.org/Forsyth-Edwards_Notation)
Piece-Square table
Move ordering
Position evaluation
Transposition table
Zobrist key
Perft

Running

To run this chess game, you have to run the file "main.py".

/!/!/!\ Be carefull about the repository access where you want to save the games. /!/!/!\

After that you will have to :

Fill the event name (string)
Fill the site where the event takes place (string)
Fill the round number (integer)
Fill the number 1 player name (string)
Fill the number 2 player name (string)
Choose a game type (IAvsIA, PlayerVsIA, PlayerVsPlayer)

The game will run and be save in "savedGames.pgn" file, which you can edit with a text editor.

Trello invite link