Description

I'm not Chuck Norris. He didn't code this AI. But it will kick you hard! Hence, this kicking name. By default it uses MinMax with AlphaBeta pruning optimization. You can switch to Monte Carlo Tree search or Random with the configuration file.

Try it out

In Arena Chess GUI

This engine supports UCI protocol so it can be plugged in any polite compatible GUI. For Arena Chess (download):

• If Java 8+ is already installed on your computer go to next step. If not, you can download.
• Download the last version of the JAR file in Releases page.
• Open Arena Chess GUI
• Go to Engines > Install New Engine and select the previous JAR file
• Select UCI
• You should now be able to play against Chuck, enjoy being kicked!

In standalone mode

Run jar:

java -jar Chuck-Norris-Chess-1.2.jar

If you terminal supports Unicode you should see something like this (I run it directly from IntelliJ):

To play, type your moves with this notation:

e2e4
e7e5
...

Known issues

If the display is broken and you want to switch to the degraded mode go to next section (configuration) and uncomment this property: #UI.UIConsole.enableUTF8=false

Configuration

Update src/main/resources/application.properties file and pass it at runtime to override default conf:

java -jar Chuck-Norris-Chess-1.2.jar --config.location=src/main/resources/application.properties

Benchmarks

We can run the JAR with benchmark option to run JMH (figures depend on your hardware and Java version):

java -jar Chuck-Norris-Chess-1.2.jar benchmark

Benchmark                      Mode  Cnt   Score   Error  Units
AlphaBetaBenchmark.alphaBeta  thrpt    5  48,335 ± 0,720  ops/s
AlphaBetaBenchmark.negaMax    thrpt    5  45,252 ± 0,642  ops/s

Dependencies

• Chesslib because they already coded all the game logic with bitboards, so why should I redo it?
• Chess-UCI to plug my engine on any standard GUI.
• Apache commons configuration to deal with config files.
• [Optional] Fantasque sans font because it's awesome.