♟️ Checkmate

Checkmate is a minimalist uci chess engine written in C.
The codebase is compact, making it suitable for learning, research, and lightweight play.

Features

• UCI support -- compatible with GUIs such as Arena, CuteChess or enCroissant
• Move generation -- legal moves including castling, en passant, and promotions
• Search -- Negamax with pruning and quiescence search
• Transposition tables -- Zobrist hashing with exact, lower, and upper bounds
• Evaluation -- material balance with basic heuristics and piece-square tables
• FEN parser -- load and analyze arbitrary positions
• Zero Bloat -- the engine is completely written from scratch, only requiring core system libraries like stdlib

Playing Style

• Strong tactically: sharp in open positions
• Limited positional depth: struggles with long-term pawn structures and strategic maneuvering
• Practical strength: effective in fast time controls and tactics-heavy games

Requirements

• Runs on most modern hardware (depth needs to be adjusted accordingly, iterative deepening ís not yet implemented)
• In theory, about 5MB of Ram is needed, i reccommend about 1-2GB if you plan to use zobrist transposition tables

Build

git clone https://github.com/kuglatec/checkmate
cd checkmate
sudo chmod +x run.sh
./run.sh

Play me

https://lichess.org/@/checkmate-engine only long time controls, no increment

Roadmap

• Improved positional evaluation (king safety, pawn structure, mobility, maybe NNUE)
• Endgame refinements / tablebase support

License

GPLv3