https://github.com/developerpaul123/byte-knight
A UCI compliant chess engine, written in Rust.
https://github.com/developerpaul123/byte-knight
chess chess-ai chess-ai-bot chess-ai-engine chess-bot chess-engine chess-engines chess-game
Last synced: 3 months ago
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A UCI compliant chess engine, written in Rust.
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/developerpaul123/byte-knight
- Owner: DeveloperPaul123
- License: gpl-3.0
- Created: 2024-07-26T14:25:49.000Z (about 1 year ago)
- Default Branch: main
- Last Pushed: 2025-07-01T14:31:51.000Z (3 months ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-07-08T16:11:49.210Z (3 months ago)
- Topics: chess, chess-ai, chess-ai-bot, chess-ai-engine, chess-bot, chess-engine, chess-engines, chess-game
- Language: Rust
- Homepage:
- Size: 17.5 MB
- Stars: 12
- Watchers: 3
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 10
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
- License: LICENSE
Awesome Lists containing this project
README
byte-knight
[](https://codecov.io/gh/DeveloperPaul123/byte-knight)
`byte-knight` is a UCI compliant chess engine written in Rust. It started as a port of the chess engine I submitted for Sebatian Lague's [Chess Engine Challenge](https://github.com/DeveloperPaul123/Leonidas) where it placed in the top 32 out of 600+ entries.
You can challenge `byte-knight` yourself on [Lichess](https://lichess.org/@/byte-knight)!
# Overview
`byte-knight` is my first "real" Rust project. I'm a long time [C++ developer](https://github.com/DeveloperPaul123?tab=repositories&q=&type=source&language=c%2B%2B&sort=stargazers) and have been itching to learn Rust. I really enjoyed participating in the chess challenge a while back and thought that writing a new chess engine from scratch would be a good way to learn the language.
`byte-knight` is a command line chess engine and does not come with any sort of user interface. There are many [chess GUIs](https://www.chessprogramming.org/GUI) out there that you can use like [cutechess](https://github.com/cutechess/cutechess).
New features are tested via my [OpenBench](https://github.com/AndyGrant/OpenBench) [intance](https://developerpaul123.pythonanywhere.com) using [SPRT](https://github.com/jw1912/SPRT/blob/main/SPRT.md#how-sprt-actually-works) testing.
# Features
## Board/Game Representation
- Bitboard board representation
- Magic bitboards for sliding piece attacks
- Zobrist hashing with board state history
- Legal move generator
## Search
- [Iterative deepening](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Iterative_Deepening)
- [Negamax](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Negamax) with alpha/beta pruning
- [Quiescence search](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Quiescence_Search)
- [Transposition Table](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Transposition_Table)
- [Principle variation search](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Principal_Variation_Search)
- [Aspiration windows](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Aspiration_Windows)
- [Reverse futility pruning](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Reverse_Futility_Pruning)
- [Late Move Reductions](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Late_Move_Reductions)
- [Internal Iterative Reductions](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Internal_Iterative_Reductions)
- [Null Move Pruning](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Null_Move_Pruning)
- [Late Move Reductions](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Late_Move_Reductions)
- [Time control](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Time_Management)
- Basic hard/soft limits
- Move ordering
- [MVV/LVA](https://www.chessprogramming.org/MVV-LVA) with transposition table priority
- [History heuristic](https://www.chessprogramming.org/History_Heuristic) with history gravity
## Evaluation
- Piece square tables with tapered evaluation using [PeSTO](https://www.chessprogramming.org/PeSTO%27s_Evaluation_Function) values.
- Project includes an HCE tuner based on [jw1912/hce-tuner](https://github.com/jw1912/hce-tuner)
## UCI
[UCI](https://www.chessprogramming.org/UCI) is a standard protocol for chess engines. `byte-knight` implements the following commands:
- `uci`
- `ucinewgame`
- `isready`
- `position moves `
- `go`
- `depth `
- `nodes `
- `wtime btime winc binc `
- `stop`
- `quit`
## Other Commands
To see all commands that `byte-knight` supports, type:
```bash
byte-knight help
```
To see all options for a given command, type `byte-knight --help`.
- `bench` - This runs a fixed depth search on a variety of positions. This is used by [OpenBench](https://github.com/AndyGrant/OpenBench) for scaling based on engine performance.
## UCI Options
| Name | Value Range | Default | Description |
| ---- | ----------- | ------- | ----------- |
| Hash | [1 - 1024] | 16 | Set the TT table size in MB |
| Threads | [1] | 1 | How many threads to use in search |
# Build and Run
Clone the repo and run:
```bash
cargo run --release
```
# Development Dependencies
To run the full suite of supported tests, benchmarks and other development dependencies, you will need the following tools (in addition to Rust and Cargo):
- [just](https://github.com/casey/just)
- Rust llvm-profdata component
- Install with `rustup component add llvm-tools-preview`
- [grcov](https://github.com/mozilla/grcov) (Used to generate code coverage reports)
- [lcov](https://github.com/linux-test-project/lcov) (Required for `genhtml` to create HTML reports from `lcov` data)
# License
The project is licensed under the GPL license. See [LICENSE](LICENSE) for more details.
# Credits
Thanks/acknowledgement for those who have inspired and helped with this project:
- Sebastian Lague for his chess YouTube vidoes and for hosting a fun coding challenge.
- The [Chess Programming Wiki](https://www.chessprogramming.org/Main_Page) for all the free information. Thank you to all the various authors.
- Analog-Hors for some excellent write ups on chess, especially regarding magic numbers.
- Many members of the Engine Programming discord for helping see how little I really know.
- [Danny Hammer](https://github.com/dannyhammer/toad) for providing feedback, for helping me with troubleshooting my engine and for writing the `chessie` and `uci-parser` crates. Thanks for inspiring some of the techniques and methods used in `byte-knight`.
- [Marcel Vanthoor](https://github.com/mvanthoor/rustic) for his Rustic engine and associated [book](https://rustic-chess.org).
- Everyone at [pyrobench](https://pyronomy.pythonanywhere.com) for donating CPU time as well as helping me when I get stuck.
# Author
| [
@DeveloperPaul123](https://github.com/DeveloperPaul123) |
|:----:|