Chess Engine

Last year, I participated to a Chess Challenge by Sebastian Lague. It was a fun experience and I learned a lot about chess programming and algorithms in general. And after the challenge was over, i couldn't help but to think about chess programming. I was fascinated by the idea of building a chess engine from scratch. So I decided to give it a try.

Now you may wonder what's the difference between the bot I created during this challenge and an actual chess engine?

My bot was built on top of a chess API, which means that I didn't have to implement the rules of chess, move generation, check and checkmate detection and so on... I only had to implement the logic of the bot itself. On the other hand, a chess engine is a standalone program that does all of that. It's a complete chess program that can play without any external help. Chess engines also use a protocol for communication with graphical user interfaces, so that they can be used to play against humans. This protocol is called UCI (Universal Chess Interface).

My main resources were the chess programming wiki and the Chess Programming youtube channel by Code Monkey King. I also read code from other engines in order to better understand how they work.

This was a fun project and I learned a lot from it. You can find the source code on my Github