Chess Challenge

In july of 2023, youtuber Sebastian Lague announced a coding challenge. The participants were given a chess API (C#), including features like move generation and validation, check and checkmate detection and so on... The goal was to implement a chess bot that would utilize this API to play chess on its own. On top of all that, one rule was added: the code had to be written in only 1024 tokens.

Once submitted, the bots would be pitted against each other in a tournament to see which one would come out on top.

As a "algorithm enthusiast", this seemed to me like a fun challenge and although I had no prior experience in C#, I decided to give it a try. This is my attempt at the challenge.

I fell into the rabbit hole of chess programming and spent a lot of time navigating through the vast amount of information available on the chess programming wiki. I learnt lots of interesting optimization techniques and tricks while working on this project. I also got to know a bit about the C# language and its syntax. The final result was a chess bot that played fairly well, considering the limitations.

On december 18 (2023), Sebastian Lague released his video showcasing the results of the tournament. More than 600 bots were submitted.

And to my surprise, my bot "Lxna", barely made the playoffs (top63) and was showcased in Sebastian`'s video against smol.cs which would later finish top 2 in the tournament.

The code is available on my Github