Cattus

Cattus is a chess engine based on DeepMind AlphaZero paper, written in Rust. It uses a neural network to evaluate positions, and MCTS as a search algorithm.

The neural network is trained by self-play of the engine itself, in iterations. The initial network may perform badly on a state, but using the search algorithm on top of the network output, a more accurate evaluation of the state is achieved, which is then fed into the network as training data.

UCI

The engine exectuable support the Universal Chess Interface.

By using python-chess the engine can be used in Python:

import chess
import chess.engine

engine = chess.engine.SimpleEngine.popen_uci(["cattus.exe", "--sim-num", "10000"])

# Let Cattus play against itself
board = chess.Board()
while  not board.is_game_over() and  not board.can_claim_draw():
    result = engine.play(board, chess.engine.Limit(time=20))
    board.push(result.move)

engine.quit()

Training

To run the training process, first one should install the python project:

1. From a directory of the project

   pip install Cattus

2. Or straight from Github:

   pip install git+https://github.com/poja/Cattus.git

Then start the training process:

python cattus-train/bin/main.py --config cattus-train/config/chess_dev.yaml