BLANK Chess Engine

BLANK is a UCI chess engine.

This engine was written from scratch based off Object-Oriented design using Java. The basic UCI (Universal Chess Interface) protocol has been implemented for communication with UCI-compatible GUIs. It also has an in-built GUI to directly interact with the engine.

Lichess

BLANK is deployed on Lichess, running on Heroku servers. You can challenge it here!

AI Features:

• Opening Book (Built into an OpeningTrie using a database of >2600 Elo Games)
• Negamax Search with Alpha-Beta pruning
• Quiescence Search
• Iterative Deepening Search
• Null-Move pruning
• Late Move Reduction
• Search Extension on check
• Static board evaluation (Tapered Evaluation with Passed Pawn evaluation)
• Move Ordering (PV Nodes, Refutation Moves, MVV / LVA for Captures, Promotion)
• Killer / History Heuristics
• Transposition Table (Zobrist Hashing)
• Insufficient material and 50-move rule draw

To-Be-Implemented:

• Aspiration Window

Installation:

You can download the binary BLANK.jar from the latest release of this repository.

This engine was built using Java SE 11. Ensure that you have installed either Java 8 or a later version of the JRE in order to run BLANK.

Navigate to the directory of the saved binary file:

cd [file directory] (i.e. "cd Desktop\BLANK-Chess").

Run the engine:

java -jar BLANK.jar

To install BLANK Chess as a UCI engine on Arena Chess GUI:

• Download the Arena GUI
• Download the binary of BLANK chess engine from the latest release.
• From the Arena GUI MenuBar, Select Engines > Install New Engine
• Select .jar file type and navigate to location of the saved binary file.
• Select the binary file and choose UCI protocol.
• Go to the MenuBar, Select Engines > Manage... > Details and Select BLANK Chess Engine
• Under General, Click on the Type drop-down list > select UCI. Apply changes.
• Enjoy the engine!