This is a chess engine written is C# 5.0.It's pretty stable now and beats Chess Titans, which comes with Windows 7, at level 10. Assuming that Chess Titans level 10 plays at just under 1700 ELO, we can say that Shutranj plays at > 1700 ELO. It has a basic UCI support and has been tested to work with Arena GUI. It has some missing functionality and much room for improvement, as listed under 'Work To Do' section.
- Bitboards for board representation
- NegaMax search with Alpha-Beta Pruning
- Iterative deepening
- Parallelised search using lockless transposition tables
- Killer heuristic
- Aspiration windows
- Checking capture moves
- Basic time controls
This is divided into two parts: Missing Functionality and Improvements.
Missing Functionality
- At the moment, pawn promotions only result in queens. The engine should promote a pawn to whatever piece is indicated in the long algebraic move notation.
- Cannot detect draw by repetition.
- Doesn't acknowledge 50-move rule.
Improvements
- Null move heuristic
- Opening book
- Ending tablebases
- Better time controls
- Enhanced UCI support
Follow these steps to run Shutranj with Arena GUI.
- Download/clone and build Shutranj solution using Visual Studio 2012 or your IDE of choice. Make sure to compile it as a 64-bit (x64) binary. Under the location (parent folder of Shutranj code)\Shutranj\Shutranj.UCIShell\bin\Release there will be a Shutranj.exe created as a result of the build.
- Download Arena 3.0 from http://www.playwitharena.com/?Download.
- Install and open Arena 3.0, go to Engines > Install New Engine... and browse to Shutranj.exe that you generated in step 1 above. That's it! The engine is installed and ready to play. As mentioned above, the UCI support is rudimentary and although the engine is capable of undoing moves, UCI support for undo move is not in place.
Hope this helps. Download the code and have a play around. If you get any problems, have any suggestions or want to contribute do to let me know.