Archduchess

A UCI chess engine written from scratch in C++. Hosted on GCP and rated ~2050 on Lichess.

Play against Archduchess on Lichess!

Features

UCI Interface

• uci, isready, ucinewgame, position, go, stop, and quit commands
• go ponder, go searchmoves and go mate are not implemented

Move Generation

• Board representation using bitboards
• Bitboard shift for pawns
• Bitboard masks for knights and kings
• Magic bitboards for sliding pieces
• Generate pseudo-legal moves, then remove illegal moves

Evaluation

• Material count
• Piece-Square Tables

Search

• Negamax
• Alpha-Beta Pruning
• Iterative Deepening
• Transposition Table
• Quiescence Search
  • Delta Pruning
• Null Move Pruning
• Check Extensions

Move Ordering

• Best move from the previous iteration
• Hash move from the transposition table
• MVV-LVA
• 2 Killer Moves
• History Heuristic
  • Indexed by side to move, start square and end square

Future Roadmap

• Better evaluation (pawn structure, king safety, endgame piece-square tables, etc...)
• Static Exchange Evaluation
• Late Move Reduction

Helpful Resources

• The Chess Programming Wiki
• TalkChess Forum
• Cute Chess
• Stockfish Features List