Riptide

Riptide is a UCI-compatible chess engine and the successor to ChessSlayer. It started as a straight port of ChessSlayer from Go to Zig, but is becoming a more performant and advanced engine over time.

Features

Board representation: bitboard
Move generation: pseudo-legal generation followed by legality check. 100% correct on Perft tests.
Search: negamax with alpha-beta pruning

UCI compatibility

Riptide requires a UCI client to use as the frontend during games. It's tested against Scid vs. PC; your mileage may vary with other clients.

Currently, the following UCI features are unimplemented:

specifying a list of moves when using the position command
the nodes, movestogo, and mate arguments to the go command
ponder mode

Installation

Install Zig version 0.10.
Clone the repository with git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/kdelwat/riptide-engine.git
Run cd riptide-engine && zig build
The riptide binary will be created in zig-cache/bin; point your GUI client to this binary.

Tests

Run unit tests with:

zig build test

Run perft correctness tests with:

zig build perft

Run node-per-second benchmarks with:

zig build nps

Profiling

zig build
valgrind --tool=callgrind zig-cache/bin/riptide
ucinewgame
position startpos
go infinite

Then run kcachegrind to analyse.

Credits

I couldn't have written this engine without the invaluable help of the Chess programming wiki and the Mediocre chess blog by Jonatan Pettersson.

kdelwat / riptide-engine