Oxide started as a simple terminal-based chess project in my personal repository Projects, but it evolved into something much bigger. A professor proposed it as a challenge, and I took it seriously, transforming it from a basic command-line game into a competitive UCI chess engine. The goal? To learn, to enjoy coding something complex without a GUI, and to build a clean, efficient, and readable piece of software.

This engine is designed to be both a learning experience and a playground for exploring chess programming. It leverages bitboards for board representation, implements move generation with obstruction difference techniques, and aims to balance simplicity with performance. Whether you're a chess enthusiast or a Rust programmer, I hope you find something interesting here!

• Complete Chess Implementation: Fully functional chess rules, including castling, en passant, promotions, and check/checkmate detection.
• Bitboards: Efficient board representation using bitboards for fast move generation and evaluation.
• Obstruction Difference: Move generation optimized with obstruction difference for sliding pieces.
• UCI Compliance: Generally compatible with UCI (Universal Chess Interface), making it playable in tools like CuteChess, Lichess (via bots), or any UCI-supporting GUI.
• Alpha-Beta Pruning: Search algorithm with alpha-beta pruning with search enhancements, single-threaded for more comprehensive read.
• Simplicity & Readability: Codebase designed to be as straightforward as possible while maintaining decent performance.
• Inspiration: Built with insights from the Chess Programming Wiki, top engines like Carp,Berserk and Akimbo, which was heavily consulted for the network implementation, The Oxide net provided with the release is trained using linrock datasets and bullet trainer.

Oxide is now a decent engine, however there is still room for improvement:

• Enhance Search: Using tables such as continuation history. Testing some prunings for the negamax move loop.
• NNUE: I would like testing and learning other configurations.

• Rust (stable, install via rustup).
• (If you want a GUI) An UCI compliant (e.g., CuteChess).

git clone https://github.com/Miguevrgo/Oxide.git
cd Oxide
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo build --release
./target/release/oxide

If you want to perform a perft test or benchmark just run:

  RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo test --release -- --nocapture

If you prefer a given position test, you can use the UCI interface