A tribute to chess programming community based on ideas taken from micro-Max by H.G. Muller
A large chess programming community helped me a lot over last three years, now I want to give
it something back. Nibble chess is a simple console based chess program which can be extended
to UCI chess engine. It's not intended to be used by end users, but by beginner programmers
who looks for some sort of resources to get started with. I wish I could have such program
when just started to learn chess programming. The source is mostly based on H.G. Muller's ideas, as
they are implemented in his micro-Max engine.
Win32 ASCII version of nibble-chess https://github.com/maksimKorzh/nibble-chess/releases
- single source file of about 300 lines of C code
- 0x88 board representation
- three nested loops pseudo-legal move generator
- material evaluation + positional scores(stored in right part of 0x88 board)
- tricky move ordering technique: scoring move during move generation
- very basic alpha-beta search
- quiescence search
- user move validation
- console-based interface
- no 3 fold repetition detection
- no 50 move rule detection
- doesn't find the closest mating line
There are various code snippets available in res/ folder:
- pretty fast move generator/perft tester with piece lists
- reimplementation of micro-Max's move generator in NASM assembly
- FEN parser for nibble chess
- very basic and raw implementation of UCI loop for nibble-chess
- single file chess project template of my own design
on linux:
gcc -Ofast nibble-chess.c -o nibble-chess
on windows:
gcc.exe -std=c99 -Ofast nibble-chess.c -o nibble-chess.exe
If you're on windows please compile nibble-chess(ASCII).c file due to I shamely
don't know how to print unicode chars under windows, sorry about that.
Any forks and contributions are appriciated. Feel free to contact me on any questions
via talkchess.com forum, opening issues on github or by email <freesoft.for.people@gmail.com>
Roland Chastain - kindly pointed out windows compilation details and reported unicode chars output issue,
provided native windows 32-bit binary executable
http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/max-src2.html - H. G. Muller's micro-Max tutorial
https://www.chessprogramming.org/Main_Page - chess programming wiki
http://talkchess.com/forum3/index.php - chess programming forum