GoChess

Go chess engine focused on:

• legal move generation
• make / unmake
• attack detection
• perft correctness and performance work

The project is not a full playing engine yet. Search, evaluation, self-play orchestration, and Lichess integration are planned but not implemented.

Layout

• internal/board Mutable board state, move representation, make/unmake, Zobrist hashing.
• internal/movegen Pseudo-legal move generation, legal filtering, checks, pins, and attack analysis.
• internal/engine Engine orchestration and perft recursion.
• cmd/perft.go Simple perft entrypoint.
• cmd/benchperft/main.go Benchmark entrypoint used by scripts/bench-perft.sh.
• cmd/uci/main.go UCI entrypoint for GUI integration and external engine tooling.
• docs/ Architecture notes, benchmark history, and optimization notes.

Common Commands

Run tests:

go test ./...

Run the reference perft benchmark:

BENCH_DEPTH=7 BENCH_MODE=hot BENCH_WARMUP=1 BENCH_NO_PERFT_TRICKS=1 ./scripts/bench-perft.sh

Run a direct perft divide:

go run ./cmd/perft.go '8/2p5/3p4/KP5r/1R3p1k/8/4P1P1/8 w - - 0 1' 7

Build the UCI binary:

mkdir -p ./bin
go build -o ./bin/gochess-uci ./cmd/uci

Documentation

• Contributing
• Project Usage
• Docs Index
• Codebase Overview
• Benchmark History
• Benchmark Learnings

Useful External Links

• FEN Position generator
• Chess FEN Viewer