Rust Chess Engine

A chess engine written in Rust that implements a complete chess game with move generation, validation, and AI opponent.

Features

• Complete chess move generation for all pieces
• Legal move validation including:
  • Check detection
  • Preventing moves that leave king in check
  • Proper piece capture rules
• Interactive command-line interface
• AI opponent using:
  • Negamax search algorithm with alpha-beta pruning
  • Iterative deepening
  • Move ordering with MVV-LVA (Most Valuable Victim - Least Valuable Attacker)
  • Position evaluation using:
    • Material counting
    • Piece-square tables for positional evaluation
    • Mobility evaluation

Board Representation

The engine uses the 0x88 board representation, which provides:

• Efficient move generation
• Fast attack detection
• Easy boundary checking

Move Generation

The engine supports all standard chess moves:

• Pawn moves (including first move two squares and diagonal captures)
• Knight moves in L-shape pattern
• Bishop diagonal moves
• Rook horizontal and vertical moves
• Queen moves (combination of rook and bishop)
• King moves (one square in any direction)

AI Features

The AI opponent uses several chess-specific optimizations:

1. Negamax search with alpha-beta pruning for efficient tree traversal
2. Iterative deepening for better move selection
3. Move ordering using MVV-LVA to improve alpha-beta pruning efficiency
4. Position evaluation using:
   • Material counting (piece values)
   • Piece-square tables for positional evaluation
   • Mobility evaluation

Usage

Run the engine with:

cargo run

Enter moves in the format "e2 e4" (from square to square).

Future Improvements

Potential areas for enhancement:

• Transposition tables for better move caching
• Opening book integration
• Endgame tablebase support
• More sophisticated evaluation function
• UCI protocol support for compatibility with chess GUIs
• Multi-threading support for parallel search

License

This project is open source and available under the MIT License.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.