Sofia - A Simple Chess Engine

Sofia (meaning wisdom) is a lightweight, educational chess engine written in C++17, designed for learning and experimentation rather than competitive play. It is a clean and simple implementation of a UCI-based engine that lays a strong foundation for further development.

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Features

• Alpha-beta pruning
• Iterative deepening
• Quiescence search
• MVV/LVA move ordering
• Principal Variation Table
• Basic static evaluation

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Next Steps

Planned improvements for future versions of Sofia:

• Improve the evaluation function
• Add support for opening book moves
• Use bitboards to improve move generation speed
• Add support for the WinBoard protocol (currently only UCI is supported)

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Compilation (Windows Only)

Make sure you have g++ that supports C++17 (e.g., version 8 or higher). You can compile Sofia using the following command in your project directory:

git clone https_repo_link
cd projectDir/src
g++ -std=c++17 -O3 -static -o sofia *.cpp

NOTE: sometimes you may encounter the error: "The code execution cannot proceed because libewinpthread-1.dll" was not found. Reinstalling the program may fix this problem." then use this command instead

g++ -std=c++17 -O3 -static -o sofia *.cpp

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to fork the project, submit pull requests, or raise issues.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the chess programming community for the resources and open-source engines that inspired this project.