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mchess2

This is a fully functioning chess engine. It is meant as a starting point for writing your own chess engine. Use it for inspiration :-)

This is actually a part of the answer: http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-get-started-with-my-own-chess-engine/answer/Michael-J%C3%B8rgensen-2

Features

  • Supports all legal chess moves, incl. castling and en-passant
  • Alpha-beta search strategy, with quiescence and iterative deepening.
  • Transposition tables.
  • A simple console (ASCII) user interface.
  • UCI interface (for GUI)
  • Time control
  • Test suites
  • It searches around 200k nodes per second on an average computer.

Documentation

The source code has comments in most places. Otherwise, the best place for a high level description is the above link to my answer on Quora. Additionally, the directory doc contains some additional information on writing chess engines.

TODO

The following is a list of features to be implemented. They are roughly ordered by most needed first.

  • Improve evaluation function. The current two calls to findLegalMoves is very slow.
  • Opening book
  • Check for draw by repetition.
  • Adapt search depth depending on time.
  • Improve negamax: E.g. NegaScout, PV-search, Aspiration Windows, MTD(f).
  • Add statistics.
  • Get it to play on FICS.
  • In search(), consider captures first. And of them, consider first those that capture a greater piece with a lesser piece.
  • Keep a list of killer moves, those that cause the window to close.