Nullstar is an experimental UCI chess engine by Jasper Sinclair.
The project began in 2026 as a new development line following my Kobra, BBCE, and Cobra engines. Nullstar retains that original chess-engine foundation while developing an independent evaluation, search, and implementation. OpenAI Codex is used as an engineering and review tool.
The current public release, Nullstar 032, uses a self-contained 768x256
side-to-move NNUE evaluator and Jasper Sinclair's stm-base epoch 29 network.
The network is compiled into the engine, so release executables need no
companion files. Nullstar 032 adds bounded soft/hard time management and
adapts its completed-iteration stopping point using best-move stability,
score trend, and root-move effort. It also includes the quantized-inference,
search-correctness, and transposition-table corrections from Nullstar 027.
BUILD_INFO.json: exact current build, UCI identity, NNUE epoch, and hash relationship;src/: engine source, Visual Studio project, MinGW Makefile, and embedded network source;training/: NNUE data-processing and training programs;tools/: development utilities;scripts/: release-build and local training launchers;docs/: building, training, network, provenance, and release documentation;nets/: published standalone copies of selected quantized NNUE networks and their documentation;binaries/: ignored local output directory for release executables.
Start with the documentation index, or see the current
release notes directly.
The supported release matrix provides normal and profile-guided MSVC builds, plus native and portable AVX2 MinGW builds. Every filename explicitly states its compiler, CPU target where applicable, and PGO status.
See docs/BUILDING.md for commands and output names.
Official builds use C++23 with MinGW and the latest language mode available in
MSVC.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jasper Sinclair.
Nullstar is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 only
(GPL-3.0-only). See LICENSE and docs/PROVENANCE.md.