A UCI chess engine.
This is a command-line chess playing program, designed to be used with a chess GUI.
We are currently using a handcrafted evaluation, and our search function is still in its early days. The engine's ELO is approximately 1700-1800.
- Board representation and move generation is in
libchess/ - Evaluation and search is in
libbenbot/ ben-bot/is the actual engine executable
See each subdirectory's readme for details.
Building or using ben-bot, libbenbot or libchess requires CMake and C++23.
All dependencies are fetched via FetchContent, so everything should "just work" out of the box.
CMake presets are provided for IDE integration, but are not mandatory.
Notes on building:
- If using
gcc, at least version 14 is required - Clang on Linux may need the
-stdlib=libc++flag in order to findstd::expected. This flag is added by theclangconfigure preset.
Our automated CI & releases include the following builds:
| OS | Compiler |
|---|---|
| Ubuntu | Clang |
| Ubuntu | GCC |
| Windows | Clang |
| Windows | MSVC |
| MacOS | Clang |
BENBOT_DOCS: controls whether docs are built (defaults to off unless this is the top-level project)BENBOT_TESTS: controls whether tests are built (defaults to off unless this is the top-level project)
Special thanks to the following open source chess projects, which have provided guidance and inspiration (in no particular order):
