This project provides some utility tools for Chess, and is designed for learning purposes. It includes the following features:
Stockfish is a powerful open-source chess engine that is widely regarded as one of the strongest chess engines in the world. Check out the Stockfish website for more information.
The project incorporates a wrapper around the Stockfish CLI, allowing users to leverage its powerful chess-playing capabilities. It spawns a Stockfish process and communicates with it via standard input and output.
We can use the Stockfish engine to find all legal moves given a position, calculate the best move for a given position, and more. We can also configure the skill level of Stockfish.
In addition to Stockfish, the project features a basic custom chess engine that offers its own unique chess-playing capabilities.
The engine uses the minimax algorithm with alpha-beta pruning to determine the best move in a given position. The engine evaluates the board position based on the following factors:
- Material balance
- Positional advantage
It looks up to the depth of 3 moves ahead and uses a simple evaluation function to determine the best move.
The project includes a custom-built HTTP server implementation, enabling users to access and interact with the chess engines through a web interface. The server is single-threaded and can handle one request at a time. It parses HTTP requests and responds with the appropriate data, as defined by the handlers. Checkout the repository
- Running
cargo runwill start the server onlocalhost:4000. - If using the stockfish engine, make sure the stockfish binary is
present in the root directory. The repository includes Stockfish
16.1 executables for Windows and Linux. For other options:
- Download the binary from the Stockfish website.
- Rename the binary to
windowsorlinuxas appropriate and place it in the root directory of the project.
Rust, Rust and Rust. The project is written entirely in Rust, and entirely by myself with minimal use of libraries, except the stockfish engine binary of course. This is in an attempt to learn things at a lower level.
The future plans for this Chess Engine API project include:
The aim is to connect the Chess Engine API with a Node.js-based chess backend and frontend, creating a full-stack chess application.
The engine could never compete with Stockfish in terms of strength, but it would be a fun project and a great learning experience to optimize the engine further. This could involve improving the ordering of moves for alpha-beta pruning, enhancing the evaluation function, etc.