NeuroSpeed

Releases

This chess engine is still in development. When I have it in working order and with some results, I will release it as version 1 (v1)

Strength

TODO:

• Update the strength table:

Features

These are the features that were implemented so far:

  Board Representation:
  - Bitboard board representation
  - Pre-calculated attack tables
  - Magic bitboards
  - Hybrid mailbox for piece lookup
  - Compact 16-bit move encoding

  Move Generation:
  - Pseudo-legal move generation
  - Separate capture move generation
  - All special moves (en passant, castling, promotions)
  - Comptime color specialization

  Search:
  - Negamax with alpha-beta pruning
  - Principal Variation Search (PVS)
  - Iterative deepening
  - Quiescence search
  - Principal Variation (PV) table
  - Mate distance pruning

  Move Ordering:
  - PV move ordering
  - MVV-LVA (Most Valuable Victim - Least Valuable Attacker)
  - Killer move heuristic (2 killers per ply)
  - History heuristic
  - Incremental move sorting

  Evaluation:
  - Material counting (incremental)
  - Piece-Square Tables (PST) - middlegame/endgame tapered
  - Passed pawns
  - Isolated pawns
  - Doubled pawns
  - Pawn chains
  - Pawn phalanx
  - Piece mobility (knights, bishops, rooks, queens)
  - King safety (pawn shelter, attacking pieces)
  - Outpost detection
  - Bishop pair bonus
  - Bad bishop penalty
  - Rook on open/semi-open files
  - Rook on 7th/2nd rank
  - Threat evaluation
  - Insufficient material detection
  - Special KBN vs K endgame evaluation
  - Game phase calculation (opening/middlegame/endgame)

  Time Management:
  - Fixed depth search
  - Fixed time search (movetime)
  - Time controls with increment (wtime/btime/winc/binc)
  - Simple time allocation

  UCI Protocol:
  - Full UCI compliance
  - Threaded search
  - FEN parsing
  - Move parsing
  - Perft testing
  - OpenBench-compatible benchmark

Engine development

Thanks and Acknowledgements

• Huge shout-out to Maksim Korzh for his chess programming series. It's a great help in explaining complex topics in chess engine development.
• Big thanks to the Avalanche chess engine and Lambergar chess engine, where I got a lot of inspiration and a better idea of how to write Zig code, as these chess engines were implemented in Zig.
• Huge shout-out to the Stockfish Discord for being helpful when it comes to questions, and to the Stockfish engine for its great implementation and clean code
• And just like 99% of chess engines, a big thanks to the Chess Programming Wiki for being such a well-structured base of knowledge when it comes to chess engine design