Sunbird

A UCI chess engine written in CPP.

Play against it here.

1. Features
2. How to Build
3. Comparison

• 16 bit move [wiki]
• 80 byte state (I.e. pieces on board, castling rights, EP rights, and hash)
  • Bitboards for pieces [wiki]
  • Zobrist hash [wiki]
• Make/unmake move through stack [wiki]
  • Make move clones state, then pushes modified state to stack
  • Unmake simply pops from stack
• Custom move generation
  • Moves for sliding pieces are generated in a piecewise manner from a series of expanding rings.

• Negamax [wiki]
• Alpha-Beta Pruning [wiki]
• Iterative Deepening [wiki]
• Quiescence Search [wiki]
• PVS [wiki]
• Move Ordering
  • MVV-LVA [wiki]
  • PV [wiki]
  • Killer Heuristic [wiki]
• Transposition Table [wiki]

• Material Point Value [wiki]
• Piece-Square Tables [wiki]
• Pawn Structure
  • Doubled pawns
  • Passed pawns
• Tapered by game phase [wiki]

Navigate to root folder of project, then run the following to build engine.

mkdir build &&\
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DIGNORE_TEST=true &&\
cmake --build build

The executable can then be found in chess_engine/build/engine/.