fast-chess

fast-chess is a versatile command-line tool designed for running chess engine tournaments. Written primarily in C++17, it utilizes doctest as its testing framework.

With fast-chess, you can effortlessly orchestrate chess tournaments, configure time controls, and execute matches concurrently for optimal time efficiency. Extensively tested for high concurrency (supporting up to 250 threads) with short time controls (0.2+0.002s), it exhibits minimal timeout issues, with only 10 matches out of 20,000 experiencing timeouts.

What's New

• Enhanced Cutechess Output: The Cutechess output support has been refined to enhance compatibility with other tools. Simply switch the -output option to cutechess to enable it.
• Extended PGN Data: You can now track nodes, seldepth, nps (nodes per second), hashfull, and tbhits in the PGN output. Refer to the -pgnout option for detailed information.
• Quick Match Option: We've introduced a -quick option for running quick matches between two engines with an EPD book. Specify -quick cmd=ENGINE1 cmd=ENGINE2 book=BOOK to swiftly initiate a match.

Quick start

Building from source

Building Fast-Chess from source is straightforward. Just follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository git clone https://github.com/Disservin/fast-chess.git
2. Navigate to the fast-chess directory cd fast-chess
3. Build the executable make -j for GCC and make -j CXX=clang++ for Clang

Download the latest release

Prefer a pre-compiled version?

Download the latest release from our release page.

Current dev versions are available as artifacts from the CI.

Example usage

Here's an example of how to use fast-chess:

fast-chess.exe -engine cmd=Engine1.exe name=Engine1 -engine cmd=Engine2.exe
name=Engine2 -each tc=10+0.1 -rounds 200 -repeat -concurrency 4

Note that setting concurrency higher than your CPU core/thread count may not yield significant performance gains and could potentially have the opposite effect. Also it is highly encouraged to use an opening book.

Command line options

See man for a detailed description of all command line options.

Contributing

We welcome contributions to fast-chess! Please ensure that any changes you make are beneficial to the development and pass the CI tests.

The code follows the Google style and is formatted with clang-format. When creating pull requests, please format your code accordingly.

To contribute, you'll need a recent GCC compiler that supports C++17 and the ability to run the Makefile. You can locally test your changes by running make -j tests, followed by executing the ./fast-chess-tests executable to verify your changes pass the tests.

You can format the code with clang-format by running make format. After making changes to the man file, you need to run make update-man.

Maintainers

The following people have push access to the repository:

• Disservin
• Szil
• PGG106