Pabi is a modern chess engine that is currently under development. The engine itself is implemented in this repository, training and development of the Neural Network for position evaluation is in kirillbobyrev/pabi-brain.

For architecture, design and development process overview, please see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Pabi is inspired by existing Chess and Go engines (mainly AlphaGo, lc0, Ceres and KataGo). It strives to be a high-quality modern engine.

Modern: Pabi should use up-to-date Rust toolchain, is targeting modern processor architectures, uses latest developments in the domains of programming tooling, Chess Programming and Machine Learning.

High-quality: Pabi will take full advantage of

• Unit testing and integration testing: the majority of the codebase is well-tested and the HEAD is in the functional state. Pabi also uses advanced testing techniques such as Fuzzing.
• Performance testing and benchmarking: Pabi should be fast. Continuous integration runs benchmarks and tests after every change.
• Continuous quality assurance: GitHub Actions make it possible to lint, test, benchmark and warn on regressions/failures. Dependabot will warn about outdated dependencies and security vulnerabilities.
• Documentation: rustdoc has awesome features, e.g. warning on undocumented code and testing example code in the documentation.

Pabi strives to be strong. The ultimate goal is to enter the lists of top chess engines and participate in tournaments, such as Chess.com Computer Chess Championship and TCEC. As such, it should be tested in appropriate time formats (mainly Blitz and Rapid) that are popular in these rating lists and designed to perform well against other engines. Performance and good time-management are crucial for doing well under time pressure.

The project is in pre-0.1.0 stage, the plan is vague and subject to change.

• 0.1.0 should be the skeleton of a chess engine. Most important features are implemented or drafted, the performance testing is in-place. There is a Command-Line Interface for interacting with the engine, debugging it and trying it out.
• 1.0.0: Pabi is a conventional and fairly strong chess engine. It can be played locally or online against other engines or human players, although its strength is not State-of-The-Art strength yet.
• 2.0.0 is possibly the ultimate goal. The Neural Networks architectures and training are designed specifically with Pabi architecture in mind and new ideas are explored.