johnsonr / tal-chess

Simple chess engine

tal-chess

TypeScript engine for chess and other two player zero-sum games.

Goals

• Code readability
• Ability to plug in and test different search and evaluation algorithms.
• Ability to play with personality. Inspired by the great Mikhail Tal. Ideally should be able to play with a choice of personalities based on famous players, through analyzing their games and classifying positions and determining their favorite types.
• Simple text-based UI making it possible to play without a UI for testing purposes. Unicode characters as used by Sunfish should suffice to represent board, and full algebraic should be used for input.

Non goals

• Sophisticated UI. Will eventually implement UCI for chess to communicate with UIs.
• Playing strength beyond grandmaster level. There are enough unbeatable engines; this one should be fun to play.

Possible future goals

• Opening book, possibly derived from games played by chosen personalities. An opening book may be supplied by a GUI when running under UCI.

References

Chess Programming

• Chess Programming Wiki
• What are PGN and FEN?

Chess

• Algebraic notation
• On personality in chess - Note particularly Botvinnik's comments and how he and Tal sought radically different types of position