jrialland/siegbert

♞ An (UCI || XBoard) compatible chess engine

This is my attempt at writing a serious chess engine.

For the moment, I consider it as a framework for experiencing ideas. It "works" enough to be able to play... quite bad

Existing features :

• Moves generation :

  • bitboard-based representation
  • 0x88 square encoding
  • Piece-Lists, avoiding to scan the whole board when generating moves
  • uses static tables for generating moves, i will probably not use "magic bitboards" because I dont understand them
  • Incremental Zobrist hashes, compatible with polyglot opening books
  • Make/Unmake using the memento pattern
  • perft-validated & heavily tested

• Minimax :

  • detects threefold repetitions (by tracking the last 4 hashes)
  • multithreaded search
  • minimax with alpha-beta pruning w/ transposition table ( ttable needs improvements)
  • (for the moment) dummy moves sorting

TODO:

• • improve compatibility with UCI
  • multi-threading
  • Embedded openings books
  • nn-based moves sorter
  • better logging
  • understand what goes wrong with my minimax
  • let it become less suicidal
  • performance ++ ?
  • implement a real moves sorter (using some kickass IA algorithm)

How to compile :

plain c++17. tested with g++, might also work with clang (msvc ?)

    sudo apt install libboost-regex-dev
    mkdir -p build && cd build && cmake .. && make -j8

How to test :

xboard :

    xboard -debugMode true -fcp build/siegbert -scp build/siegbert

type ctrl-t and watch it loose against itself

uci : (incoming)