stupid-horse

A bot that plays standard/960 chess on Lichess, all time controls. Still a work in progress!

Set up a Lichess bot account
Make an .env file with bot token and ID
Run the bot (go run .), and it listens for incoming challenges and ongoing games.

Make the bot care about time controls. Right now, the bot thinks at a certain depth no matter the time left.
(Possibly) create a web interface to look at bot evaluations in live-time

Bot does not put importance to sooner checkmate patterns. In this game, it played into a draw by repetition instead of a mate in 1.
Bot cannot convert clearly winning positions (examples: one)
Bot sometimes doesn't hear opponent move notifications causing it to wait for a move forever (needs to be restarted to fix)

My journey

I enjoy chess
I have always wanted to create a chess bot
I saw it as a daunting challenge as a child and now I am equipped with the skill and experience to avenge myself
I saw this as a nice exercise with a lots of room to learn

Browsed through Go tutorials
Created functions and structs to parse FEN, and set the logic involving board, pieces
Set up move searching to get all valid moves for a given position (state of chess board in a game)
Wrote tests and benchmark functions along the way to look for optimizations
Implemented the minimax algorithm (with α-β) to choose best move after considering all possible outcomes at a certain depth (e.g. 3 moves ahead)
Hooked up the Lichess API and made the bot accept challenges and play moves!
To be continnued...

Coding in Go! I found that I really enjoy Go due to its readability, strong typing, intuitive keywords, built-in test writing, etc...
Writing modular components and tests & benchmarks, making it easy to add new features and optimize parts of the project
Consuming an API in Go, especially handling streams in ndjson format
The fastest stalemate from the standard starting position, researched while creating tests for game state
Honestly a lot more that I'd love to chat about