sastaFish is a toy chess engine written in modern C++17. It is a project that I had made to conclude my first year at University. It is designed mainly for educational purposes.
- The engine utilizes a bitboard architecture for move generation.
- The search function uses a modified version of alpha-beta pruning combined with a quiescence search for stability.
- Polyglot hashing is also implemented for opening book support.
- The engine is optimized using transposition tables and repetition tables combined with polyglot hashing.
- Further optimization of captures is done using the MVV-LVA heuristic, and I have planned to add Static Exchange Evaluation.
sastaFish/
├── include/ # Header files
├── src/ # Source files
├── data/ # Opening books
├── build/ # Compiled binaries (created after build)
├── test/ # Perft tests, for debugging
├── Makefile # Build configuration
└── README.md # Project documentation
- Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/P41NT/sastaFish.git cd sastaFish - Compile and run
make run
- Check out the commands
>>> help
The engine will start-up with the banner being displayed. You can interact with it on the terminal with UCI commands. However its better to link it to a chess GUI. I recommend using https://cutechess.com/ as all testing was done with it.
To use cuteChess,
- Download the GUI.
- Navigate to
Tools > Settings > Engines. - Click on the
+button - Under
working directory, select the root of the project, and undercommandselectbuild/main - Make a new game using CuteChess GUI and select the engine as a bot.