A UCI-compatible hobby chess engine written in Zig.

Features

• Position representation with bitboards
• Legal move generation
• Best move search using quiescence search, the minimax algorithm, and alpha-beta pruning
• UCI mode
• Terminal mode

Build

Requires Zig 0.16+.

zig build --release=fast

The resulting binary is written to zig-out/bin/chessengine.

Terminal mode

Play in the terminal:

./zig-out/bin/chessengine play

or

zig build run -- play

UCI mode

With no arguments, the engine runs in UCI mode. Use any UCI-compatible GUI to play it (e.g. cutechess)

./zig-out/bin/chessengine

License

MIT