Chess Engine

A high-performance chess engine written in C, featuring an advanced move generation system, graphical interface, and bot API for automated gameplay.

Features

🚀 High-Performance Move Generation

• Bitboard representation for efficient board state management
• Magic bitboards for O(1) sliding piece move generation
• Multi-threaded perft testing achieving up to 80 million moves per second
• Compact move structures optimized for cache efficiency

🎮 Graphical Interface

• Interactive chess board with visual piece movement
• Human vs Bot gameplay
• Bot vs Bot gameplay

🤖 Bot API

• bot communication
• Support for bot vs bot matches
• Standardized move format and game state representation
• Easy integration for custom chess engines

🧠 Chess Engine

• Legal move generation with full rule support
• Evaluation function for position assessment
• Search algorithms for move selection
• Support for standard chess notation

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• GCC or compatible C compiler
• Make build system
• POSIX threads support (for multi-threading)
• SDL2 for ui

Building the Project

# Clone the repository
git clone [https://github.com/TomBaran501/chessboardEngine.git]
cd [chessboardEngine]

# Build and run the project
make run

Documentation

Comprehensive documentation is available in the documentation/ folder:

• Move Generation - Technical details on the legal move generation system, optimization techniques, and performance benchmarks
• Bot API - API specification for developing and connecting chess bots
• Main Commands - Command-line interface reference and usage guide

Usage

Playing Against the Bot

Launch the graphical interface and play against the built-in chess engine. Use the documented commands to control the game flow.

Running Bot vs Bot Matches

Start the API server and connect your bots to compete against each other. See the Bot API documentation for integration details.

Performance Testing

Run perft tests to verify move generation correctness and measure performance:

./chess 
go perft [depth]

Project Structure

├── src/                  # Source code files
├── lib/                  # Header files
├── documentation/        # Project documentation
├── tests/                # Test suites
├── bots/                 # Test suites
├── Makefile              # Build configuration
└── README.md             # This file

Performance Benchmarks

• Move generation: Up to 80 million moves/second (perft)
• Evaluation speed: Between 5 millions and 40 millions positions evaluated per second

Technical Highlights

• Efficient bitboard-based board representation
• Magic bitboard move generation for sliding pieces
• Multi-threaded perft calculations
• Cache-optimized data structures
• Minimal memory footprint per move

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2025 Baran Tom

Acknowledgments

• Magic bitboard implementation inspired by Chess Programming Wiki
• Perft positions from standard test suites

Note: This is an educational/hobby project demonstrating advanced techniques in chess programming and game engine development.