ychess

ychess is a chess implementation and engine written in nim.

Usage and contribution

For the following subsections to work properly you need to have nim.cfg files so you don't need to pass all compiler arguments manually. To automatically create the config files run nim c -r createCfg.nim from the root directory of the project.

Todos

TODO.md contains a list of features that are planned.

Command line

To play chess in the commandline simply download the code (or clone the repository) and run nim c -r game.nim. You can either play the 1v1 hotseat mode or a single player mode vs the engine.

Lichess

ychess uses the lichess api to make playing more convenient. An instance of the engine occasionally plays on lichess. To get into the whitelist just write a ingame message to the account.

If you want to create an instance on lichess yourself you need to set a api token. This is done in src/engine/secret.nim. It should have the following structure:

let api_token* = "<lichess api token for bot>"

Following that you will want to set your username into the whitelist in src/engine/lichessBridge.nim. After that you can start the lichess bot by running nim c -r src/engine/lichessBridge.nim.

Project Structure

• art - contains pictures and arts not used in the code.
• bin - is not pushed to the git repository but contains all binaries and will be created if you compile a program.
• htmldocs - is not pushed to the git repository but contains all automatically generated documentation.
• ressources - is not pushed to the git repository but contains all the data used in source code but not being source code itself (e.g. databases).
• src - is the root folder for all programs except tests.
• tests - contains all tests.

Documentation

Documentation is written into the code via DocGen. For this reason it is not saved in this repository. To extract it into html (assuming you want the documentation for game.nim) run nim doc --project --index:on --outdir:htmldocs game.nim.

Additional Documentation

Moves

Moves are read from the commandline as pure coordinate notation. The inner program will convert this notation to a move-tuple.

Board Representation

Due to easier off the board checking a 10x12 board is used.

Engine

The engine uses a simple implementation of the NegaMax-algorithm with Alpha-Beta-Pruning. For the evaluation function each piece has a corresponding value. Additionally piece-square tables are used.

Code Style Guide

Make sure to take a look at the official nim style guide. All conventions should be applied to this code.

Additionally there are a bunch of steps to make the code more consistent.

Constants

Constants should start with an uppercase letter but shouldn't be written in all caps (const FooBar = 2).

Whitespaces

Basic arithmetic operations should be surrounded by spaces for example: 1 + 3. This however is not true for negation of a single value (-1) or if the arithmetic operation is done inside array brackets or in iterators (a+1..3, a[c+3]).

Function calls

Determining the length of a string, array, etc should not be done via a function (len(array)) but by appending it like array.len. In the same style function calls should be done (chess.convertToFen() instead of convertToFen(chess)). This however is not true if the function takes a first argument that is not an abstract datatype like the joinPath function (all the parameters are strings).

booleans and logic

If statements should not contain outer brackets. In some cases (especially concatenations of and and or) inner brackets are useful to increase readability in complexer logic formulas.

When assigning booleans with logical formulas outer brackets are expected (var boolVar = (1 == 1)).