tompko/patrician

A chess engine experiment in C

patrician's Issues

Improve pawn generation

Pawn moves should be calculated per target move rather than per pawn.

Search/Evaluation

When given the command line option "-s " Patrician should run an analysis on each position in the file. If not provided the analysis count seconds should default to 60. Patrician should log summary stats for each position including depth searched, best move, and score.

Negascout

Patrician should use negascout as its search function as an improvement to alpha-beta search.

Parallel Search

Patrician should use a parallel search algorithm to explore the game tree.

Magic bitboards

Patrician should use magic bitboards for sliding piece move generation.

Remove filter moves

Filtering should be done during the search rather than at move generation time.

Quiescence

Patrician should quiesce positions before evaluation.

Command line option perft

Patrician should parse the command line options, and if a "-p " is found should run any perft tests in the given file.
A perft test is an epd with one or more D operations, giving the perft result at depth n.
If all tests pass Patrician should exit with EXIT_SUCCESS, if any fail it should exit with EXIT_FAILURE.

Move as Integer

Moves should be represented by an integer, so that when sorted the move most likely to generate the best score is first. The move order should be:

• Hash move - from transposition table
• Killer moves - once implemented
• Captures - in order from highest captured, lowest capturer to lowest captured, highest capturer
• Quiet moves

Unit testing

Create unit tests.

Logging

Logging should be done on a low priority thread so we can log in release builds. Different levels of logging should be supported, with a command line switch to control how much is logged.

XBoard Error Bug

On an unknown command from xboard Patrician should respond with the "Error (ERRORTYPE): COMMAND" message instead of logging and exiting.

XBoard integration

Patrician should be capable of playing a game of chess through the xboard interface.

EPD Parsing

Patrician should be capable of parsing an epd file conforming to the specs provided here:
http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Extended+Position+Description

Move ordering

After each iteration of searching the moves should be sorted by score.

Time Control

Patrician should decide how much of the remaining clock to use when searching, rather than using a fixed depth.