README.md

♟ Excalibur – A Chess Engine

A chess engine which implements:

• The Minimax algorithm for optimal movement analysis
• Alpha-beta pruning for move searching
• Move ordering based off heuristics like captures and promotions
• Tomasz Michniewski's Simplified Evaluation Function for board evaluation and piece-square tables
• A command-line user interface

It uses Python 3.8 with mypy type hints and unit + integration tests.

Install

pip install -r requirements.txt

Use it via the command-line

Start the engine with:

python3 chess_board.py

Start as [w]hite or [b]lack:
w

  8 ♖ ♘ ♗ ♕ ♔ ♗ ♘ ♖
  7 ♙ ♙ ♙ ♙ ♙ ♙ ♙ ♙
  6 · · · · · · · ·
  5 · · · · · · · ·
  4 · · · · · · · ·
  3 · · · · · · · ·
  2 ♟ ♟ ♟ ♟ ♟ ♟ ♟ ♟
  1 ♜ ♞ ♝ ♛ ♚ ♝ ♞ ♜
    a b c d e f g h

Your move (e.g. b1c3):

Tests

There are unit tests for the engine, UI, and evaluation modules.

python3 -m unittest discover tests/

Type checking:

mypy .