Laura

Laura is a multi-threaded, UCI-compatible chess engine written in Rust, designed with a focus on speed, modularity, and tactical strength.

The project is divided into two main components:

• laura_core – A fast and efficient legal move generator for chess engines.
• laura_engine – The UCI-compatible chess engine currently under active development.

Installation & Compilation

You have two main options to install and run Laura:

1. Compile from Source

To build Laura optimized for your machine, ensure you have Rust installed, then run:

git clone https://github.com/HansTibberio/Laura.git
cd Laura
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo build --release

For even better performance on supported CPUs, enable the bmi2 feature:

RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo build --release --features bmi2

2. Download Precompiled Binary

You can also download a precompiled binary from the Releases section. Just choose the version that matches your system and run the binary directly.

Features

• Hand-crafted static evaluation function
• Super-fast legal move generation
• Fail-soft negamax with alpha-beta pruning
• Iterative deepening
• Aspiration windows
• Principal variation search (PVS)
• Lockless transposition table
• Lazy SMP (multithreaded search)
• Advanced move ordering:
  • Killer heuristic
  • MVV/LVA (Most Valuable Victim / Least Valuable Attacker)
• Mate distance pruning
• Internal iterative reductions (IIR)
• Quiescence search

License

This project is licensed under GPLv3. See the LICENSE file for details.