How to play

• Clone the project
• Run make
• Run make run
• A prompt will appear. run console. This commands sets the game mode to console, which is the only one available to you if you don't have a front end. run help to have the list of all available commands. You can start off a new game by typing "new", then writing a move respecting the notation. Or you can enter an existing fen position with "setboard".
• If you want to play the black pieces: console > new > go

Front ends

You can use dedicated chess front ends on the internet, this chess-engine follows the uci and xboard protocols.

Main steps of the development

• setting up the the board structure
• create initializers for initial board position and FEN reader
• setting up the structure and helper functions for pawns (bit board)
• create some basic printing function for debugging
• defining hashing function for position key
• define pieces helpers arrays (such as in data.c)
• create move generations functions for each type of movement (capture/quiet move, castling, sliding/non-sliding pieces, pawns)
• proceed with the creation of move making functions
• performance testing with recursion

Some notes on debugging

the ASSERT macro that is used all over the codebase does NOT impact AT ALL the performance of the program if the DEBUG macro is no defined. The pre-processor will basically ignore it and the binaries will be free from any asserts. However, it is very useful in development and must be activated.

Todo

• Optimize compilation
  
• Make command for running perf testing
  
• Improve move ordering to increase chances of beta cut offs
• Create a front end ?