Snowy is a UCI chess engine written in C++. It uses an array-based board representation (ie, not bitboard), and searches in a straightforward minimax manner, with no depth extensions or reductions. The playing strength has not been precisely evaluated, but it is somewhere between faile and Vice.
It is available under the terms of the MIT license.
Windows binaries can be found in the Releases section.
For portability, CMake is used to generate platform-specific build configurations.
On Linux, you can build and run with:
$ cmake -B out/Release -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
$ cd out/Release
$ make
$ ./snowy
On Windows, recent versions of Visual Studio can open a directory containing a CMakeLists.txt file directly with no configuration required. Alternatively, if you wish to use a more traditional Visual Studio solution, start "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS" (to get the cmake bundled with VS into your $PATH) and run:
$ cmake -B out
This will generate a Visual Studio solution in the "out" directory.
This engine would not have been possible without the knowledge freely shared by others:
- The truly excellent Chess Programming Wiki
- The Computer Chess Club
- The simple and approachable TSCP engine
- The strong and very well commented Crafty engine
If you pursue only one of those resources, let it be the Chess Programming Wiki. I cannot overstate what a great help it has been to a beginner like myself.