Pounce

A UCI compatible chess engine written in Rust.

Features

• Fast, bitboard based move generation
• PV alpha-beta search with quiescence search
• Iterative deepening and aspiration windows
• Lockless transposition tables
• MVV-LVA capture ordering
• Killer moves
• History heuristic
• Internal iterative reduction
• Null move pruning
• Reverse futility pruning
• Late move reductions
• Node effort based time management
• Lazy SMP parallelism

There's also a magic bitboard generator in the wiz binary, and an alternate datagen binary (datagen) that's still WIP.

Building

You can build an optimized binary with:

make pgo-release

This requires cargo-pgo which will be installed automatically by the Makefile.

A normal release build can be built with:

cargo build --release

If you'd like to build either additional binaries (wiz or datagen), you can use:

cargo build --release --features wiz --bin wiz

or

cargo build --release --features datagen --bin datagen

Credits

• Sebastian Lague's Coding Adventure chess engine series. on YouTube for the inspiration to write a chess engine, as well as cogent explanations of the concepts involved.
• The Chess Programming Wiki
• Jordan Bray's Chess rust package for inspiration for fast move generation.

Also the following engines for their inspiration and ideas:

• Stockfish
• Ethereal
• Weiss
• Viridithas
• Carp
• Smallbrain

Also Fastchess for sprt testing.