Rad1

A Simple Chess Engine in Rust

About

This is a very simple (command-line only + single-threaded) chess engine written in Rust to explore chess engine algorithms and to actually learn the language. This is just be a fun side project with no real intent of making a chess engine that is in any way competetive. I just wanted to see if I could write a chess engine that I couldn't beat (I'm not that good ~1200-1300). It uses chess for move generation and board and game representation. The Chess Programming Wiki has been a great resource for learning how to do this along with The Rust Book.

Some of the algorithms for this engine are:

• NegaMax with Alpha-Beta pruning
• Iterative Deepening
• Null Move Pruning
• Check Extensions
• Quiescence Search
• Transposition Tables
• Zobrist Hashing

There are still a lot of things I'd like to improve upon:

• Adding UCI Protocol for it to play within UCI GUIs and against other chess engines
• Some kind of multi-threaded search to increase speed and depth
• A way to ponder so it's not sitting idle while the other player is making a move
• Time controls
• Better (any) memory handling... This can use a lot of memory
• Improving the way transposition tables are handled
• Better evaluation function. The evaluation function I used is really naive but does suprisingly well. Only piece values and position are currently used.

Quickstart

Install rust and cargo

It's better to build a release version of the code instead of just using cargo run

❯ cargo build --release

Help:

❯ ./target/release/rad1-cli --help
Rad1 Chess Engine 0.2.1
Sam Foster <[email protected]>
A Simple Chess Engine in Rust

USAGE:
    rad1-cli <SUBCOMMAND>

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

SUBCOMMANDS:
    analyze    Analyze a single position
    help       Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
    play       Play against the chess engine from terminal

To play against the engine in the terminal:

❯ ./target/release/rad1-cli play

To evaluate a specific position from a FEN representation

❯ ./target/release/rad1-cli analyze --fen "r3k2r/1p3pp1/p1p4p/3pP3/1PP5/P2P1P2/2qnKQ1P/8 b kq - 7 28"
1 - d2c4 = 145
2 - d2e4 = 224
3 - d2e4 = 234
4 - d2e4 = 237
5 - d2e4 = 32767
6 - d2e4 = 32767
7 - d2e4 = 32767
8 - d2e4 = 32767
Best move: d2e4
Size: 17779