Chessboard

[Roland Chastain]

Hello everybody!

One word to say that a new version of the UCI chess engine (Luciole) is available on GitLab. (I am moving all my projects from GitHub to GitLab.)

The engine used to crash in some situations. It has been fixed, and now it seems to be very stable (though still very easy to beat).

On the other hand, I did not retouch the chessboard. The latest version is the one attached in the first post of the discussion (septembre 21, 2019).

Best regards.

Roland

[ivan]

Hello Mr. Chastain and good to see that you have kept this project alive. If your script is compatible with UCI you can set it up to play against other AIs. This way you can estimate the ELO rating of your chess AI. A while ago, I also wrote a similar chess engine and managed to get it to search around 8 half-moves ahead in a few seconds (which is not very good).
Also, my superstrict library is more advanced compared to the traditional strict.lua. You probably want to turn off strict.lua in production code anyways.

[Roland Chastain]

@ivan

Thank you for your kind answer. I always come back to Lua (and LÖVE) with pleasure, but my main language is Pascal. (You can see here my UCI chess GUI.)

Yes, engines tournaments are fun. This is the way I test Luciole (with cutechess-cli or c-chess-cli).

As I said, Luciole is very weak. It can be a good opponent for a child who learns chess. If someones wonders, there are strong chess engines in Lua here. It's a pity that the author didn't make UCI or XBoard/WinBoard interfaces. Someday, when I have time...

For me, I would be glad if my engine were perfectly stable, which is not so easy, especially since it plays both standard chess and Fischer random chess. I also would like to connect the engine to the chessboard. One day...

I will take a look to your superstrict library. Sounds very interesting.

How could I turn off strict.lua? By turning the code to comment, or do you know another way?

See you soon!

[ivan]

As I said, Luciole is very weak. It can be a good opponent for a child who learns chess. If someones wonders, there are strong chess engines in Lua here. It's a pity that the author didn't make UCI or XBoard/WinBoard interfaces. Someday, when I have time...

I have tried the Chess4eva engines but they are not very strong. These are direct ports and are heavily reliant on the "bit" module. Your engine and mine are designed around the Lua language so congratulations you are on the frontline in chess programming with Lua.

How could I turn off strict.lua? By turning the code to comment, or do you know another way?

Strict works during runtime by setting a _G metatable which requires code execution and adds a tiny bit of overhead when accessing global variables.
SuperStrict uses static analysis so you can just iterate all of your source files (no need to execute anything) and it will find ALL of your errors.

[Kestutis]

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[Roland Chastain]

Cool! It works well under Linux. Not yet had time to read the code carefully, but I will do it. Thank you for sharing.

[Kestutis]

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[Kestutis]

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[Roland Chastain]

@Kestutis

I don't know if you are interested in the idea of ​​improving the visual aspect of your game. Maybe right now you prefer to focus on the artificial player. But I just came across these images that I found beautiful. To save you time (in case you're interested), I'm attaching here a very simple script that cuts out the images.

[Kestutis]

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