william3johnson/golemate

Golemate - chess position evaluation on gWASM

About Golemate

Golemate is a proof-of-concept of running chess engines under Golem. At the moment, it searches for the best move for a given position. We would like to have human vs Golem matches in the future. This repository consists of three parts:

• a common library which provides means to launch engines compliant with the UCI protocol
• a CLI client application
• a GUI client application

The library was written in mind to support multiple backends, currently implemented are:

Native backend

Launches a UCI-compatible engine compiled as a binary, directly on the host. This is the reference implementation.

gWASM backend

Launches a UCI-compatible engine compiled to gWASM, using Golem Clay. Running jobs requires a working instance of Golem in either mainnet or testnet mode.

For more information how to setup Golem, consult the Golem docs. To get a gWASM-compatible engine, you may follow the build instructions of our fork of FabChess. You can try another engine if it is compatible with gWASM.

Enable/disable features

Build of particular backends may be disabled using the cargo features for the library and the CLI. By default all backends are enabled.

For instance, to disable the native backend and build only the gWASM backend, use

cargo build --features gwasm --no-default-features

or disable the gWASM backend and build only the native backend, use

cargo build --features native --no-default-features

Note that the GUI doesn't currently support feature-gating described above.

Hardcoded parameters

Since this is a PoC, not all parameters are configurable. In particular, the following are hardcoded:

• hash size: 1024 for native, 128 for gWASM (cf. this issue)
• Golem client address: 127.0.0.1, port 61001

Example use

You can export a chess position to FEN format using the lichess.org editor, for instance.

CLI

Run a position analysis with the native backend

cargo run -- --engine /path/to/stockfish_20011801_x64_bmi2 --fen "r1bqkbnr/ppp2ppp/2n5/8/2BpP3/5N2/PP3PPP/RNBQK2R w KQkq - 1 6" --depth 20

Run a position analysis with the gWASM backend

cargo run -- --wasm /path/to/uci_engine.wasm --js /path/to/uci-engine.js --workspace workspace --datadir /path/to/golem/datadir1/ --fen "8/4kp1p/1n2p3/1P6/8/8/p2rBPPP/R4K2 w - - 0 36" --depth 20

For more information about the available options, use cargo run -- --help. Note that their availability may depend on the enabled features.

GUI

To launch the GUI, run

cargo run -p golemate-gui

The GUI requires Gtk+ 3.16 or newer.