https://github.com/tomcant/anodos
A UCI-compatible chess engine written in Rust.
https://github.com/tomcant/anodos
alpha-beta-pruning chess chess-engine negamax rust uci
Last synced: 5 months ago
JSON representation
A UCI-compatible chess engine written in Rust.
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/tomcant/anodos
- Owner: tomcant
- License: mit
- Created: 2022-07-18T21:17:04.000Z (almost 4 years ago)
- Default Branch: main
- Last Pushed: 2026-02-01T10:28:10.000Z (5 months ago)
- Last Synced: 2026-02-01T10:47:46.002Z (5 months ago)
- Topics: alpha-beta-pruning, chess, chess-engine, negamax, rust, uci
- Language: Rust
- Homepage:
- Size: 347 KB
- Stars: 4
- Watchers: 2
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 2
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
- License: LICENSE
Awesome Lists containing this project
README
Anodos – Chess Engine
[![Build][build-badge]][build-link]
[![Release][latest-badge]][latest-link]
## Overview
Anodos is a UCI-compatible chess engine written in Rust. Built from scratch with bitboard-based move generation and alpha-beta optimised search.
## Features
- Move generation
- Bitboards for pseudo-legal move generation
- [Fancy magic][fancy-magic-link] sliding piece attacks
- Search
- Iterative deepening
- Aspiration windows
- Negamax with alpha/beta pruning
- Null-move pruning
- Extended/reverse futility pruning
- Principal variation search
- Late move reductions
- Quiescence search
- Check extension
- Transposition table with Zobrist keys
- Move ordering
- TT move
- MVV/LVA
- Killer moves
- History heuristic
- Evaluation
- Basic material counting
- MG/EG PSQTs (currently with game phase tapering for the king only)
- Piece mobility
- Universal Chess Interface
- Play via any UCI-compatible GUI (e.g. Cute Chess, En Croissant)
- Basic time management with `movetime` / `wtime` / `btime` / `winc` / `binc`
## Roadmap
- Search
- Counter-move heuristic
- Static exchange evaluation
- Multi-threading
- Evaluation
- Insufficient material draw detection
- Tapered PSQTs for all other pieces
- Syzygy tablebase support
## Universal Chess Interface
Supported commands:
```
uci
isready
ucinewgame
position startpos [moves ...]
position fen [moves ...]
go [infinite]
go depth
go nodes
go movetime
go wtime btime [winc ] [binc ]
setoption name Hash value
stop
quit
```
## Non-standard Commands
Beyond the UCI protocol, the engine supports these debugging/utility commands:
| Command | Description |
|---------|-------------|
| `perft ` | Run perft to validate move generation |
| `printboard` | Display the current position |
| `printfen` | Output the current position as a FEN string |
| `domove ` | Make a move on the current position (e.g., `domove e2e4`) |
## Compilation
This project uses Rust edition 2024, so you'll need Rust 1.85+ (stable).
### Building and Running
For the best performance, always use release mode:
```sh
cargo build --release
./target/release/anodos
```
Alternatively, you can run in release mode directly:
```sh
cargo run --release
```
To enable debug assertions (useful during development for catching bugs), use:
```sh
cargo run
```
Only use debug mode for testing and development; release mode is strongly recommended for actual games or benchmarks.
### PGO (Profile-guided Optimisation)
Binaries published on the [Releases][releases-link] page are built with PGO (see [.github/workflows/release.yml][release.yml-link]).
To run a local PGO build:
```sh
rustup component add llvm-tools-preview
cargo install cargo-pgo
# Build an instrumented binary
cargo pgo build
# Collect profiles by running the benchmark command
cargo pgo run -- bench
# Build the optimised (PGO) binary
cargo pgo optimize
```
## Testing
Run the test suite:
```sh
cargo test
```
This includes a shallow perft check from the starting position (depth 5).
To run the deeper perft test suite (ignored by default), include ignored tests and use release mode:
```sh
cargo test --release -- --include-ignored
```
## Benchmarking
To measure the engine's nodes-per-second performance, run the binary as follows:
```sh
./anodos bench [--depth ] [--tt-mb ]
```
- `--depth` (default: 13) sets the search depth for each position
- `--tt-mb` (default: 64) sets the transposition table size in MB
[build-link]: https://github.com/tomcant/anodos/actions/workflows/test.yml
[build-badge]: https://img.shields.io/github/actions/workflow/status/tomcant/anodos/test.yml?style=for-the-badge&branch=main&logo=github
[latest-link]: https://github.com/tomcant/anodos/releases/latest
[latest-badge]: https://img.shields.io/github/v/release/tomcant/anodos?style=for-the-badge&label=latest%20release
[fancy-magic-link]: https://www.chessprogramming.org/Magic_Bitboards#Fancy
[releases-link]: https://github.com/tomcant/anodos/releases
[release.yml-link]: https://github.com/tomcant/anodos/blob/main/.github/workflows/release.yml