QuaintanceBot (My own chess ai attempt)
What is this?
This is a Alpha-Beta chess engine that I built in julia.
Using this chess board library I created a simple chess engine
Currently the engine can look 8 moves deep and beats me often.
Play on Lichess
https://lichess.org/@/QuaintanceBot
How to Run
- Install packages
# requires julia >= 1.6 julia install.jl - Build Opening Book
julia create_database.jl - Play the AI
julia main.jl --play - Run tests
julia tests.jl - Run tournament
julia main.jl --tournament
Why?
Seemed like an interesting project as I was getting more interested in chess.
I was also interested in leaning more julia, so this project was a way to explore the language.
Project Structure
├── README.md
├── create_database.jl # Create Opening Database
├── download_lichess.sh # Download the latest games from the lichess deployment
├── engine.sh # General commandline interface for UCI
├── games # Record of past games played
│ ├── game-1.618450741813242e9.pgn
├── install.jl # package installs
├── main.jl # game loop and cli interface
├── old_python # old python port of the project
│ ├── main.py
│ ├── players.py
│ └── tests.py
├── pgns # opening book pgns
│ ├── 638_annotated_games.pgn
│ ├── Deeply_Annotated_Games.pgn
│ ├── Linares_GM_Games.pgn
│ ├── kasparov_1798.pgn
│ └── spassky_1805.pgn
├── players.jl # AI and Human Players
├── tables.jl # Useful Tables
├── talk.jl # UCI engine interface
├── tests.jl # Unit tests
└── utils.jl # Algorithms
UCI Support
This engine has some halfbaked UCI support.
This is implemented in talk.jl and accessed with engine.sh
Note that due to the fact that juila cannot be compiled you must have julia installed to run this engine interface.
Example Config:
dir: "./engines/" # Directory containing engines, relative to this project.
name: "engine.sh" # Binary name of the engine to use.
Lichess bot used: https://github.com/ShailChoksi/lichess-bot
Future Improvements
-
Actually use Zobrist Hashing in the transposition table
-
Make the transposition table cull entries rather than just grow until there is no more memory
-
Improve opening performance by making the algorithm attack the center
-
Fix checkmating blunders in the tests
-
actually structure the search like a human (checks, captures, attacks, development)
Resources
List of links that I used to make this.
- https://www.chessprogramming.org/Main_Page
- https://lichess.org/team/lichess-elite-database
- https://juliadocs.github.io/Julia-Cheat-Sheet/
- https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/types/#Composite-Types-1
- https://riptutorial.com/julia-lang
- https://juliabyexample.helpmanual.io/#Packages-and-Including-of-Files
- https://romstad.github.io/Chess.jl/dev/ https://lichess.org/editor
- https://int8.io/chess-position-evaluation-with-convolutional-neural-networks-in-julia/
- https://chesstempo.com/pgn-viewer/