Panda

Panda is a chess engine written in Rust (still a work in progress). It is called Panda because:

• pandas are black and white like a chess board
• pandas are pretty cool
• red pandas are also pretty cool, and they are orange (like Rust)

Lichess Bot

I used the repo https://github.com/lichess-bot-devs/lichess-bot to create a lichess bot for Panda. Unfortunately it probably won't be online that much because I'm hosting it locally.

Panda Lichess Bot

Features:

• Move Generation
  • Magic Bitboards
  • Make/Unmake Approach
• Search
  • Negamax Search
  • Quiescence Search
  • Principal Variation Search
  • Iterative Deepening
  • Transposition Table
  • Aspiration Windows
  • Internal Iterative Deepening
  • Pruning
    • Alpha/Beta Pruning
    • Null Move Pruning
    • Beta Pruning/Reverse Futility Pruning
    • Alpha Pruning/Futility Pruning
    • Razoring into Quiescence Search
    • SEE Pruning
    • Mate Distance Pruning
    • Late Move Reductions
  • Move Ordering
    • Moves are ordered as follows:
    • Move from transposition table (if available)
    • PV Move
    • Winning captures by SEE (ordered by MVV/LVA)
    • Killer Moves
    • Moves Sorted by History Heuristic
    • Losing captures by SEE (ordered by MVV/LVA)
    • Underpromotions
• Evaluation
  • Piece-Square Tables with middlegame and endgame weights
  • Mobility Calculations
  • Pawn Structure Evaluation + Passed Pawns
  • Tapered Evaluation
  • Mobility Score
  • King Safety
  • Some other stuff

Todo:

The best way to improve the engine's playing strength would probably be to optimise move generation by calculating check and pin masks instead of using make/unmake to verify legality. Instead, I'm probably gonna work on finding a way to tune the evaluation function using Genetic Algorithm/Simulated Annealing because that's more fun.

Usage:

• Download Rust
• Build and run the project (NOTE: you must use --release mode or the magic bitboards will not work)
• connect to a UCI gui such as CuteChess or Arena

Acknowledgements

Here are some of the many resources without which this engine would be much less strong:

• Chess Programming Wiki
• BBC Chess Engine + videos
• Most of all, open source chess engines such as Stockfish, Ethereal and Weiss which have extremely clear and helpful documentation