Made it Bug-Less! (and faster!)

during the past 2 days i wrote a lot of crappy code, like, A LOT OF CRAPPY CODE, which was so crappy a lot of it was straight-out incorrect, so i had to spend a lot of time debugging and playing against it in Cute-Chess and Lichess in order to know where the issues were at, also i made some slight optimizations like better move ordering and less memory usage, also i finally deployed it to Lichess! if the bot is offline for some reason shoot me a message on slack and i’ll revive it!

Special thanks to @penguinencounter and @tom for helping me test the engine, bellow is an image of @penguinencounter’s game with it!

Made it visual!

I implemented UCI which made it easy to visualize the chess engine better and hopefully make it easier to debug! also i had to rewrite some main functions in order to optimize the engine further, it still struggles with depths like 6 and 7 and barely holds 1s for depth 5, so getting it to depth 7 under 1s and being bug-less should be the shipping goal!

what was done:

• Optimize move generation (domove/undomove instead of storing boards!)

• Implement UCI move notation

• Implement UCI and hook it up with Cute-Chess and Lichess

• Remove Board from being global and pass by reference instead

Made the chess engine functional!

I’ve finished the longest part which is move generation, for now the engine fully traverses depth 5 in an average of 1.24s for initial positions even with alpha-beta prunning

next step is implementing UCI and optimizing move generation and perhaps attempt Monto-carlo search and other non-bruteforce methods, and also train a NNUE to evaluate boards instead of the hand-made evaluation function