A powerful chess engine implemented in C++, featuring efficient bitboard operations and comprehensive move generation for all pieces.

• Features
• Technical Implementation
  • Board Representation
  • Sliding Pieces Calculation
  • Move Generation
• Setup
• Usage
• Project Structure
• Task Checklist

• Bitboard-based chess board representation
• FEN string parsing and position setup
• Comprehensive move generation for all pieces
• Attack table pre-computation for faster move generation
• Unicode chess piece visualization
• Support for special moves (castling, en passant)

The chess engine uses bitboards (64-bit integers) for efficient board representation:

• Each piece type has its own bitboard
• Additional bitboards for white and black pieces
• Position tracking using bit manipulation operations
• Support for complete chess state including castling rights and en passant squares

The engine implements an efficient method for calculating sliding piece moves (rooks, bishops, queens):

• Pre-computed attack tables for each square
• Efficient bitboard operations (MSB, LSB) for ray tracing
• Separate handling of each movement direction
• Occupancy consideration to handle piece blocking

The engine generates legal moves using:

• Pre-computed attack tables for non-sliding pieces (pawns, knights, kings)
• Dynamic calculation for sliding pieces based on current board occupation
• Special move handling (castling, en passant, promotions)
• Legal move filtering based on check detection

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/jatingaur18/Chess-Engine.git

2. Build the project:

make

Run the chess engine:

./a

or

make run

to build and run

The engine supports:

• FEN string input for position setup
• Move generation visualization
• Unicode piece display
• Performance metrics

• main.cpp - Entry point and testing framework
• board.cpp - Core chess board implementation and move generation
• utils.h - Utility functions and constants
• board.h - Class declarations and bitboard definitions

• Bitboard Design
• Piece Representation
• Square Indexing
• Board Initialization
• FEN Parsing

• Pawn Moves
• Knight Moves
• King Moves
• Rook, Bishop, Queen Sliding Moves
• Precomputed Attack Tables
• Castling Logic
• En Passant Logic
• Promotion Handling
• Check Detection
• Legal Move Filtering

• Minimax Search
• Alpha-Beta Pruning
• Evaluation Placeholder

• MVV-LVA Ordering
• Killer Move Heuristic
• Transposition Table (Zobrist Hashing)

• Quiescence Search
• Static Exchange Evaluation (SEE)
• Stand Pat Evaluation

• Principal Variation Search (PVS)
• Late Move Reductions (LMR)
• Null Move Pruning
• Aspiration Windows

• Material Evaluation
• Piece-Square Tables
• King Safety Heuristics
• Mobility Evaluation
• Pawn Structure (Isolated, Passed, Doubled)

• Integrate Pretrained NNUE
• Custom NNUE Model Training
• Evaluation Layer Replacement with NNUE

• Endgame Heuristics
• Syzygy Tablebase Support
• Tablebase Probing

• Time Management Logic
• Multi-Threading (SMP Search)
• Move Caching & Reuse
• Benchmarking & Profiling

• Reinforcement Learning Pipeline (Leela Style)
• Hybrid MCTS + AlphaBeta
• Style Customization (Aggressive, Positional, Defensive)