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This repository has been archived by the owner on Mar 2, 2021. It is now read-only.

folksgl/challenger

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Travis (.com) Coveralls github contributions welcome

Challenger is my own custom chess engine.

The goal of challenger is to take on the Stockfish chess engine, which is currently the best chess engine in the world.

Status

Undergoing re-design: Challenger started as a personal project to get better at C++ in January 2019. Since then, I've learned a lot! For that reason, Challenger is currently being re-designed in a new repository thats still in development. Keep an eye out for challenger-rs in February 2021!

Currently, challenger is a "complete" chess engine in that it can play legal chess. It currently generates ~20,000,000 moves per second (hardware-dependant). However, before moving development on to making challenger smarter in which moves it chooses to play, I'm attempting to optimize move generation (20M/nps is poor compared to the roughly 200M/nps that qperft can generate on my machine).

Progress

Current level: 0

Percentage winning next level: progress

The progress of challenger will be gauged as follows: Challenger will play Stockfish starting at its lowest level. Once the Challenger engine can beat the Stockfish engine at the given level at least 60% of the time, the Stockfish level will be increased, the "Current level completed" label above will be updated, and a release of the code will be made to snapshot the progress made. The "Percentage winning next level" label indicates challenger's progress in beating the next level of Stockfish.

Percentages will be determined by playing 10 games and recording winnings.

Installation

To install the challenger engine and run it against another chess engine, you will need to install a UCI (Universal Chess Interface) compatible chess program. I recommend Arena, as it is the one I use for challenger.

  1. Download and install Arena

    1. Navigate to the Arena Website and head to the downloads section.
    2. Unzip and install.
  2. Head over to the release page and download the latest challenger executable for your platform. and compile challenger. The following should work for most linux systems:

  3. Open Arena and import the challenger engine executable. Navigate to Engines -> Install new engine... and select the challenger executable that was just downloaded or compiled. (If you compiled challenger from source, the executable will be in the challenger project build directory)

Development and Contributing

Development for challenger will be done in C++, using the googletest framework for testing. Before opening issues or pull requests, please read the contributing page for Challenger.

Contributions of all kinds are welcomed and encouraged. This project is far from finished and there are always portions of the code or documentation that can be improved.