/stash-bot

Mirror of my Gitlab chess engine project.

Primary LanguageCGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

Stash

Stash is a UCI-compliant chess engine developed from scratch. Preferably used with a GUI like Arena, CuteChess, Fritz, etc.

Files

The repository consists of the following files:

  • Readme.md, the file you are currently reading.
  • LICENSE, a text file containing the GNU General Public License version 3.
  • src, the directory containing all the source code + a Makefile that can be used to compile Stash on Unix-like systems (or Windows if you installed MinGW).
  • utils\build.sh, a shell script that can generate profiled builds for your architecture.
  • utils\release_build.sh, a shell script mainly intended for the contributors to automatically generate all binaries when creating releases.

UCI Parameters

Stash supports for now all these UCI options:

  • Threads

    Sets the number of cores used for searching a position (defaults to 1).

  • Hash

    Sets the hash table size in MB (defaults to 16).

  • Clear Hash

    Clears the hash table.

  • MultiPV

    Output the best N lines (principal variations) when searching. Leave at 1 for best performance.

  • Move Overhead

    Assumes a time delay of x milliseconds due to network and GUI overheads. Increase it if the engine often loses games on time. The default value of 100 ms should be sufficient for all chess GUIs.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • How do I compile this project for my computer ?

    If you are on a Unix-like system, simply go to the src directory from a terminal and type:

    make

    Special architecture optimizations may be applied by typing:

    make ARCH=arch_name

    with arch_name being one of the following: x86-64, x86-64-modern or x86-64-bmi2. Use ARCH=unknown if you don't know your CPU architecture, or if you're compiling on a 32-bit machine.

  • I do not have a compiler on my machine: how do I do ?

    Compiled binaries for Linux and Windows are available from the "releases" page of the project. You can download the binary corresponding to your operating system and architecture.

  • Which binary should I choose ?

    The latest release should always be the best. The different architecture builds are:

    • 64: generic 64-bit build. Should work on all 64-bit processors of your operating system.

    • x86_64: x86_64 build. Same as previous one, but enables use of the prefetch instruction, which places RAM addresses in cache for faster access. Should work on almost all 64-bit processors.

    • x86_64-modern: same as previous one, but also enables use of the popcnt (Population Count) instruction. Should work on all > 2006 64-bit processors.

    • x86_64-bmi2: same as previous one, but also enables use of the pext (Parallel Bit Extract) instruction. Should work on all AMD processors with Excavator arch or newer, and all Intel processors with Haswell arch or newer.