Overview

This project aims to create an efficient, UCI-compatible chess engine (and library) in OCaml.

Requirements

For best performance, please ensure that a Flambda-enabled OCaml compiler is installed. The engine also makes extensive use of the 64-bit bitboard representation, so 32-bit platforms will be at a significant performance disadvantage.

The following OCaml packages are required, available via opam install <pkg>:

• bap-future
• cmdliner
• core_kernel
• dune
• monads
• ocaml_intrinsics
• odoc
• ounit2
• ppx_compare
• ppx_fields_conv
• ppx_hash
• ppx_sexp_conv

The custom testing GUI requires the following:

• CSFML 2.5

For building, a version of Make (such as GNU Make) is needed for building the project.

Note that this project assumes that the target system is POSIX-compliant (Windows users may encounter some trouble).

Setup

• To build and install the project, run make (these can be done individually with make build and make install, respectively).
• To uninstall the project, run make uninstall.
• To clean the build artifacts, run make clean.
• To run the unit tests, run make test.
• For generating documentation, run make doc.

The generated documentation (in HTML format) should be located in ./chess/_build/default/_doc/_html/index.html, which can be opened in your browser of choice.

Usage

For a list of commands (and general info), run ocamlchess --help.

To communicate with the engine via UCI, run ocamlchess uci. The engine will listen for commands on stdin and will respond on stdout. See this page for a description of the UCI protocol.

To use the custom testing GUI, run ocamlchess gui. See ocamlchess gui --help for more information.

ocamlchess perft <n> will run the performance test up to depth n. See ocamlchess perft --help for more information.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following projects/resources, which have been used to aid the development of ocamlchess:

• The Chess Programming Wiki
• Ethereal
• Stockfish
• Inanis
• mantissa
• Shallow Blue
• wukongJS