Monza - A Chess Engine Written in C++ — Estimated Rating: 2000

Monza is in early development and is a built for the purpose of it being a capstone project.

"Monza" is a city that's just northeast of Italy and it is used as a reference to Monza Circuit; one of the highest speed Formula 1 tracks and is known as the temple of speed.

Currently working on:

• Board Representation
  • [X] Piece Centric Representation using Bitboards
  • [X] Defining macros for Bitboard Operations (SET/GET/POP)
  • [X] Encoding Pieces on the board
  • [X] FEN Parser
• Move Generation
  • [X] pre-calculated pawn attack table.
  • [X] pre-calculated knight attack table.
  • [X] pre-calculated king attack table.
  • [X] Generate Rook attack squares.
  • [X] Generate Bishop attack squares.
  • [X] Limit Rook / Bishop attackes to blocked squares.
  • [X] Generating Rook / Bishop Magic Numbers
  • [X] pre-calculated sliding pieces attack tables (rook/bishop...) - Magic Bitboards
• Other
  • [X] Define macros for ls1b and count bits
  • ls1b:
    • Using __builtin_ctzll from C++.
  • count_bits
    • Using __builtin_popcountll.
    • it seems that the above implementation is faster than using Brian Kernighan’s Algorithm which uses bitboard &= bitboard - 1; within a loop to count how many times the bits are eliminated.

Features / Todo of Monza

• Some optimization
• A much better Evaluation mechanism.
• GUI
• Code Cleaning, Folder Structure.

Resources / Inspiration

Sources that I looked at extensively

In no particular order

• Maksim Korzh - BBC (Bitboard Chess Engine)
• Jay Honnold - Berserk Chess Engine
• Andrew Grant - Ethereal Chess Engine
• Pradyumna Kannan - Magic Move-Bitboard Generation in Computer Chess
• Chess Programming Wiki
• Trevor Fenner & Mark Levene - Move Generation with Perfect Hash Functions
• Bluefever Software
• Among a plethora of resources here: https://github.com/mourabitiziyad/Monza-Chess-Engine-Report#7references