ViCTORIA

ViCTORIA is a UCI chess engine built from scratch using C++ 20.

ViCTORIA performs a in-depth analysis of the position with a handcrafted evaluation function.

It can perform an analysis in reasonable (10-25 seconds) time between depth 6 and 10+, depending on the number of possible moves.

Its elo rating is 1694 in blitz (February 2021).

ViCTORIA is not a complete chess program and requires a UCI-compatible graphical user interface (GUI) (e.g. XBoard with PolyGlot, Scid, Cute Chess, eboard, Arena, Sigma Chess, Shredder, Chess Partner or Fritz) in order to be used comfortably

Build

ViCTORIA is built from scratch, so you don't need any C++ library, only a compiler (min C++ 17).

You need CMake. On Windows you can use Cygwin to install g++ and make.

Then:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake..
make

In the future, I will provide binaries.

Usage

./ViCTORIA

UCI commands:

• position starpos [moves move_list]
• position fen your_fen [moves move_list]
• go depth n
• go infinite: wait for the stop command
• go movetime t: search for t milliseconds
• go wtime t1 btime t2 [winc t3 binc t4]: Whites has t1 ms on clock Blacks has t2 ms on clock. Whites increment their time by t3 ms and Blacks increment their time by t4 ms
• go nodes n search for n nodes (In fact, the number of nodes explored will be a bit greater than n)
• set openings path use the openings book at path (must be in UCI format)

Evaluation function

Among other thing, the evaluation function takes into account:

• Material score
• Pieces/squares tables
• Different evaluation for end game (differents pieces/position tables, pawn value is slightly increased, etc...)

Features

• Alpha-Beta pruning
• Magic bitboard for sliding pieces
• Iterative deepening
• Aspiration windows
• Move ordering
  • Captures table
  • Killer move heuristic
• Transposition table with Zobrist's hashing function (1 000 000 positions ~ 50 Mb)
• Openings book

License

GNU v3