ChessLib

A C# chess data library with complete move generation and all needed custom types.

Requirements

• .NET Core 3.1+

What is this for?

This library contains all the data, types and structures for which to create a piece of chess software. It does not contain any heuristics or search algorithms as these are meant to be implemented separately.

But why?

This library was developed during a course "Advanced C# and object oriented programming E17" at DTU (Danish Technical University) as part of a chess user interface, which will be released at a later stage when it is ready. Since the UI needs to handle legality, mate check etc etc, all these features are contained within the library.

Can i use this as a starting point for my chess software?

Yes you can, it is designed with that in mind.

Features

• Custom perft application which uses the library to calculate and compare results from custom positions
• Transposition Table
• Complete move generation with legality check
• Custom compact and very efficient types for Bitboard, Square, Piece, Move, Player, File, Rank and Direction with tons of operators and helper functionality
• 100% Bitboard support with piece attacks for all types, including lots of helper functions
• Lots of pre-calculated bitboard arrays to aid in the creation of an evaluation functionality
• FEN handling with optional legality check
• Magic bitboard implementation Copyright (C) 2007 Pradyumna Kannan. Converted to C#
• FEN input and output supported
• Chess960 support
• Zobrist key support
• Basic UCI structure
• HiRes timer
• Draw by repetition detection
• Mate validation
• Plenty of unit tests to see how it works
• Notation generation for the following notation types: Fan, San, Lan, Ran, Uci
• Benchmark project for perft
• Custom MoveList data structure
• Pawn blockage algorithm

Is it fast?

Yes. As far as C# goes it should be able to hold its own.

Perft console test program approximate timings to depth 6

• AMD-FX 8350 = ~12.5 seconds. (without TT) (earlier version)
• Intel i7-8086k = ~4 seconds

What is not included?

• Evaluation
• Search
• Communication using e.i. UCI (base parameter struct supplied though)

Planned

• Basic chess engine (search + evaluation) w. UCI support
• As nuget package