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 the Make software. On Windows you can use Cygwin to install g++ and make.

Then:

cd build
make

In the future, I will provide binaries.

Usage

cd out
./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]: White has t1 ms on clock Black has t2 ms on clock. White increment their time by t3 ms and Black increment their time by t4 ms

Evaluation function

Among other thing, the evaluation function takes into account:

• Material score
• Mobility score
• Pieces/position 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