Chessboard
CLI to solve combinatoric chess puzzles.
Stable release: 
Development: 
Motivation
This project started its life as a coding challenge I was asked to solve while interviewing in 2015 for a software engineering position at Uber.
After the interview proccess ended, I kept toying with the code, as a playground to test some optimization strategies in Python. It is now a boilerplate that I use to:
- bootstrap CLI-based projects powered with Click,
- keep up with the current state-of-art of Python packaging,
- streamline the integration of a data stack (Numpy, Pandas, Seaborn and Conda),
- automate testing and quality checks (unit-tests, coverage, coding style and packaging) on macOS, Linux and Windows,
- provide an auto-generated documentation.
Examples
Simple 3x3 board with 2 kings and a rook:
$ chessboard solve --length=3 --height=3 --king=2 --rook=1
<SolverContext: length=3, height=3, pieces={'rook': 1, 'king': 2, 'queen': 0, 'bishop': 0, 'knight': 0}>
Searching positions...
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4 results found in 0.03 seconds.
Famous eight queens puzzle, without printing the solutions to speed things up:
$ chessboard solve --length=8 --height=8 --queen=8 --silent
<SolverContext: length=8, height=8, pieces={'rook': 0, 'king': 0, 'queen': 8, 'bishop': 0, 'knight': 0}>
Searching positions...
92 results found in 119.87 seconds.
Huge combinatoric problem can take some time to solve:
$ chessboard solve --length=7 --height=7 --king=2 --queen=2 --bishop=2 --knight=1 --silent
<SolverContext: length=7, height=7, pieces={'rook': 0, 'king': 2, 'queen': 2, 'bishop': 2, 'knight': 1}>
Searching positions...
3063828 results found in 9328.33 seconds.
The CLI allow the production of a profiling graph, to identify code hot spots and bottleneck:.
$ chessboard solve --length=6 --height=6 --king=2 --queen=2 --bishop=2 --knight=1 --silent --profile
<SolverContext: length=6, height=6, pieces={'rook': 0, 'king': 2, 'queen': 2, 'bishop': 2, 'knight': 1}>
Searching positions...
23752 results found in 207.25 seconds.
Execution profile saved at /home/kevin/chessboard/solver-profile.png
Third-party
This project package's boilerplate is sourced from the code I wrote for Scaleway's postal-address module, which is published under a GPLv2+ License.
The CLI code is based on the one I wrote for the kdenlive-tools module, published under a BSD license.