Should we build a strong chess engine? How do I go about it? I need to get started by interfacing with UCI, but how? Then, what next? Any idea to leverage Julia’s strength? For example, I’m thinking of generating code using Julia’s metaprogramming to generate some parts of the engine.

[image] [ANN] Chess.jl - A Julia chess programming library Package Announcements I just published the first version of Chess.jl , a library for computer chess. This is my first Julia project, and I am not a real programmer, so much of the code probably looks amateurish, but…

I know that one. Thanks for the suggestion. That was a utility package for representing boards and so on, and the board representation here could be useful, but this was not specifically for building a UCI chess engine or something. Most chess engines have their own board representation and move gen…

There’s also GitHub - abahm/Chess.jl: Chess engine written in Julia Perhaps tell us what you’ve already found :joy::joy::joy:

I found that one too. Nice one. This unlicensed, unnamed chess engine, IDK the strength, but the last commit was 2 years ago.

well, some good opening gambits for both packages would be doing some tests, issues, and pull requests to get them up to current Julia status. Or, if you don’t see any activity, contemplate a (repo, not knight) fork!

My Chess.jl package is, as @Tarny_GG_Channie points out, not really that well suited for writing a chess engine (although you certainly could). It’s designed more for higher level-chess software. Some low-level parts of the code (like the SquareSet type) would probably be useful, but I wouldn’t reco…

Disclaimer, I don’t know very much about chess programming but I have significant experience with (game of) go programming, which at a higher level should be similar enough. [image] Tarny_GG_Channie: Should we build a strong chess engine? How do I go about it? A word of advice is to only emb…

Unless you have specific ideas how to use this to your advantage, metaprogramming isn’t something I would consider at an early stage. I agree. Contrary to what most people believe, chess engines are quite small and simple programs, and metaprogramming doesn’t add a lot of benefits (apart from bei…

One particular use of metaprogramming I was thinking was searching for patch that gains elo, my idea was that there would be a huge search tree searched with lots of nodes (Using long time), then compute which node was actually searched with each patch. Then, we can search for variants of the engine…

Just to know, are you considering a “classical” chess engine or a Reinforcement Learning based one? In such case the first step would be likely look for a sponsor for the computational costs :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

Building a strong Julia chess engine

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cormullion July 18, 2023, 11:51am 2

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Building a strong Julia chess engine

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