Pleco is a Chess Library inspired by Stockfish, written entirely in Rust.
This project aims to utilize the efficiency of Rust to create a Chess Library & AI with the speed of modern chess engines.
This project is split into two crates, pleco (the library you are currently in), which contains the library functionality, and pleco_engine, which contains the
UCI (Universal Chess Interface) compatible Engine & AI.
For the chess engine implemented using the features provided by pleco,
see pleco_engine.
Some of the features pleco implements:
- Bitboard Representation of Piece Locations:
- Ability for concurrent Board State access, for use by parallel searchers
- Full Move-generation Capabilities, including generation of pseudo-legal moves
- Statically computed lookup-tables (including Magic Bitboards)
- Zobrist Hashing
- A Transposition Table: lightning fast lookup table storing information for a board
- Pre-implemented searchers, some of which using rayon.rs for easy parallelism
To use Pleco inside your own Rust projects, Pleco.rs is available as a library on crates.io.
nightly rust is required to use.
Setting up a board position is extremely simple.
```rust use pleco::{Board,Player,PieceType};
let board = Board::startpos(); asserteq!(board.countpiece(Player::White,PieceType::P), 8); asserteq!(&board.fen(),"rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1"); ```
A Board can be created with any valid chess position using a valid FEN (Forsyth-Edwards Notation) String.
Check out the Wikipedia article for more information on FEN Strings
and their format.
rust
let board: Board = Board::from_fen("rnbqkbnr/pp1ppppp/8/2p5/4P3/8/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq c6 0 2").unwrap();
Moves are represented with a BitMove structure. They must be generated by a Board object directly, to be
considered a valid move. Using Board::generate_moves() will generate all legal BitMoves of the current
position for the current player.
```rust
use pleco::{Board,BitMove};
let mut board = Board::startpos(); // create a board of the starting position let moves = board.generatemoves(); // generate all possible legal moves board.applymove(moves[0]); asserteq!(board.moves_played(), 1); ```
We can ask the Board to apply a move to itself from a string. This string must follow the format of a standard UCI Move, in the format [srcsq][dstsq][promo]. E.g., moving a piece from A1 to B3 would have a uci string of "a1b3", while promoting a pawn would look something like "e7e81". If the board is supplied a UCI move that is either incorrectly formatted or illegal, false shall be returned.
rust
let mut board = Board::start_pos(); // create a board of the starting position
let success = board.apply_uci_move("e7e8q"); // apply a move where piece on e7 -> eq, promotes to queen
assert!(!success); // Wrong, not a valid move for the starting position
We can revert to the previous chessboard state with a simple Board::undo_move():
rust
let mut board = Board::start_pos();
board.apply_uci_move("e2e4"); // A very good starting move, might I say
assert_eq!(board.moves_played(),1);
board.undo_move();
assert_eq!(board.moves_played(),0);
Any and all contributions are welcome! Open up a PR to contribute some improvements. Look at the Issues tab to see what needs some help.
Pleco is distributed under the terms of the MIT license. See LICENSE-MIT for details. Opening a pull requests is assumed to signal agreement with these licensing terms.