chess-zero

AlphaZero-style chess engine and self-play RL pipeline built from scratch.

• Own chess board (no external chess libraries in main code)
• No supervised bootstrap; learns from rules + win/draw/loss only
• Mac-first; cloud burst when bottlenecked
• Public build-in-public on serkan.ai/projects/chess-zero

Status

Scaffold stage. See serkan.ai/journal/starting-chess-zero for the kickoff note and the project page for the current roadmap.

Development

uv sync --all-extras

uv run pytest
uv run ruff check
uv run mypy

python-chess is allowed only inside tests/oracles/ as a perft oracle. A conftest.py guard fails CI if chess_zero/ ever imports it.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.