Apollo is a small chess engine, written in Rust, accompanied with a small Lichess-compatible server written in Go. Apollo is a UCI-compatible engine and is able to speak to any UCI-compatible chess GUI. The author uses PyChess mostly to play with the engine.
Using the server component, Apollo is able to play on Lichess. The Lichess bot operated by me plays under apollo_bot moniker. You can challenge it on Lichess!
Apollo is an extremely standard, unimaginative chess engine. Today, it uses naive mode ordering combined with a transposition table backed alpha-beta search. Apollo's search averages a branching factor between 8 and 12, which is not good. As a result, Apollo can't search very deep.
Apollo needs a lot of work before it plays strong chess, but it can beat beginner players and bots on Lichess that deliberately lose.
apollo-server is a small Go server that bridges the Lichess REST API and Apollo,
using UCI to communicate with Apollo. This works reasonably well, well enough that
Apollo can play pretty much anybody on Lichess without the server getting confused.
The server makes no attempt to control the number of games that it plays concurrently. Please be nice to my bot, playing lots of games will set my server on fire.
Apollo requires that you have Go and Rust installed. make will compile the engine
and server components, while make test will run all tests and make docker will
build and tag a Docker image suitable for deployment.