croissantdealer

croissantdealer is a simple chess bot. He probably isn't the toughest enemy that you've ever faced, but it's definitely fun to create him! :) He has been written from scratch (well, almost. The communication with Lichess's API and move generation has been self-implemented. The only thing that we're using is the chess library (we're only using it for board manipulation (no already built engines)). Other than that, it's also worth noting that croissantdealer is an absolute chad that never plays 1. d4 ;> And no, he doesn't sell croissants. You can play with him here 👍

features

as of right now, croissantdealer has these features:

1. minimax; alpha beta pruning - the bot is using minimax for move generation :)
2. ordering the moves for pruning - certain moves will be ordered specifically to make the bot be able to prune the other options
3. transposition table - the bot is using a transposition table to avoid evaluating position a couple of times

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute, go ahead :). All the contributions are greatly appreciated. I'll try to close all of the PR's and Issues ASAP. You can checkout the guide to enter the development enviorment below.

Starting the dev environment

1. create the python virtual environment: python3 -m venv env
2. start the virtual environment: source env/bin/activate (if you're on Linux, Windows uses different syntax)
3. install all the needed packages: pip3 install -r requirements.txt,

After doing that, create the "secrets.env" file in this directory, and define the token there like that: lichess_api_token="<your_bots_token_here>" other than that, you should also define the dev_username there like that: dev_username="<your_lichess_username>" (the bot will reject other users game requests) and set the environment to dev by pasting this line: environment="DEVELOPMENT". Now you can just run the bot (python3 main.py) and then head over to lichess ;D

TO-DO List

1. actually make him never play 1. d4
2. make the bot think about the position while the opponent is thinking
3. make the bot spend different time thinking about the move based on the time control
4. make the bot resign games that are being played for too long (lichess only allows a couple of streams at one moment)