blunder

A chess engine written in modern C++.

Dependencies

• A modern C++ compiler with support for C++23, such as gcc 13.1.1 or clang 16 or greater.
• A recent version of cmake, at least 3.23, to generate the build files without having to change CMakeLists.txt.
• A generator supported by CMake that can be used for compiling C++, such as make or ninja.
• A unix-like environment, e.g. Linux, MacOS. Support for Windows will be added later.
• Google Test for unit testing.
• The pytorch c++ frontend. The easiest way to get this working is to install the library via a system package manager, e.g. pacman on archlinux. If you have a custom install of the library in a non-default location, e.g. ${HOME}/opt/libtorch, then exporting TORCH_INSTALL_PREFIX=${HOME}/opt/libtorch, or setting the variable when running cmake, will allow the build to work. For development, I'm using Torch version 2.1 with CUDA 12.1, which is currently the latest release.

Compiling

Assuming that all the dependencies are installed and make is the default build tool, the blunder library and executables can be built by running the following commands:

cd blunder
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Notes

This is in super early stage development. The only artifacts produced by the project are:

• bbprinter: an executable to print common bitboards.
• genmagic: an executable to generate magic numbers for sliding pieces.

At the moment, these artificts are meant to help with development and debugging, and as foundation for move generation.