Apollo is a UCI compatible chess engine created in c++. Apollo is built as a traditional chess engine, meaning CPU heavy with alpha-beta search and a hardcoded evaluation function at the tree leaves.
./apollo Runs apollo
uci Tells apollo to use the uci protocol and list the available options.
setoption name Hash value 64 Tells apollo to allocate 64MB for the transpostion table.
ucinewgame Tells apollo to set up a blank board.
go depth 10 Starts a search for the best move 10 ply deep.
go movetime 1000 Starts a search that runs until 1000 milliseconds pass.
- Alpha-beta Principal Variation Search
- Iterative Deepening
- Aspiration Windows
- Time management algorithm
- Quiescence search
- Magic bitboards
- Pseudo-legal move generation
- Pinned pieces optimizations
- History heuristic
- Killer move heuristic
- Countermove Bonus
- Most Valuable Victim - Least Valuable Aggressor (MVVLVA)
- Transposition Table
- Late Move Reductions (LMR)
- Futility Pruning
- Reverse-Futility Pruning
- Null Move Pruning
- Delta Pruning
- Passed Pawns
- Isolated Pawns
- Doubled Pawns
- Open Files
- Semi-Open Files
- Centralization of Pieces
- Pawn shield for king safety
- Material Evaluation
- Separate Endgame Evaluation
- Bitboards
- Zobrist Hashing
- Perft (
perft [depth]) : Counts how many moves are possible from a given position. - Debug (
d) : Displays debug information such as the current evaluation, move suggested by the transposition table, and more.
- Compile with cl:
cl uci.cpp bbmagic.cpp board.cpp movegen.cpp bitboard.cpp testing.cpp eval.cpp search.cpp zobrist.cpp transpo.cpp /Ox /Feapollo /EHsc - Compile with g++:
g++ -std=c++11 uci.cpp bbmagic.cpp board.cpp movegen.cpp bitboard.cpp testing.cpp eval.cpp search.cpp zobrist.cpp transpo.cpp -O3 -o apollo
Much inspiration has been taken from the chessprogramming wiki, the bot Godot, and some from Carballo and the CPW Engine.