dialectical-chess

dialectical-chess is a UCI-capable chess engine experiment built around explicit dialectical move arguments. It uses an owned chess move-generation substrate, shallow tactical/search witnesses, optional Z3-backed tactical checks, doxa for opinion-valued gradual argument semantics, and the formal-argumentation package for Dung skeptical filtering.

The engine is experimental. It is meant for research, diagnostics, and small benchmarks rather than competitive chess strength.

Install

uv sync

The package pins doxa and formal-argumentation to GitHub commit SHAs so a clean checkout can resolve the same argumentation library revisions.

Commands

Run the default probe:

uv run dialectical-chess-probe

Run as a UCI engine:

uv run dialectical-chess-probe --uci

Run the owned move-generation self-test:

uv run dialectical-chess-owned --selftest

Run the built-in EPD smoke benchmark:

uv run dialectical-chess-bench --epd .\dialectical_chess\fixtures\dialectical_chess_smoke.epd

Development

uv run pytest
uv run pyright

The committed fixtures under dialectical_chess/fixtures are intentionally small. Larger benchmark corpora and generated diagnostic artifacts should stay outside the package unless they are deliberately promoted.