This project aims to create an efficient, UCI-compatible chess engine (and library) in OCaml.
For best performance, please ensure that a Flambda-enabled OCaml compiler is installed. The engine also makes extensive use of the 64-bit bitboard representation, so 32-bit platforms will be at a significant performance disadvantage.
The following OCaml packages are required, available via opam install <pkg>:
- bap-future
- cmdliner
- core_kernel
- dune
- monads
- ocaml_intrinsics
- odoc
- ounit2
- ppx_compare
- ppx_fields_conv
- ppx_hash
- ppx_sexp_conv
The custom testing GUI requires the following:
- CSFML 2.5
For building, a version of Make (such as GNU Make) is needed for building the project.
Note that this project assumes that the target system is POSIX-compliant (Windows users may encounter some trouble).
- To build and install the project, run
make(these can be done individually withmake buildandmake install, respectively). - To uninstall the project, run
make uninstall. - To clean the build artifacts, run
make clean. - To run the unit tests, run
make test. - For generating documentation, run
make doc.
The generated documentation (in HTML format) should be located in ./chess/_build/default/_doc/_html/index.html, which can be opened in your browser of choice.
For a list of commands (and general info), run ocamlchess --help.
To communicate with the engine via UCI, run ocamlchess uci.
The engine will listen for commands on stdin and will respond on stdout.
See this page for a description of the UCI protocol.
To use the custom testing GUI, run ocamlchess gui.
See ocamlchess gui --help for more information.
ocamlchess perft <n> will run the performance test up to depth n.
See ocamlchess perft --help for more information.
We would like to thank the following projects/resources, which have been used to aid the development of ocamlchess: