Victoire ⚔️

Victoire is a UCI chess engine written in Zig. It uses pruning and reduction techniques to reduce the search space of the principal variation search (PVS). And several other methods to accelerate the search or enhance evaluation, such as the use of transposition tables, quiescence search, tapered evaluation...

⚡️ Quick start

First, download and install Zig from the official website.

⚠️ Note: version 0.12.0 is recommended.

Next, clone this repository and build the project using the command:

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast

You can now connect Victoire to a GUI such as Cute Chess or directly run the engine with the command:

zig-out/bin/Victoire

🌟 Features

Victoire uses the UCI protocol to communicate.

🎮 Available commands

The commands interpreted by the engine are listed below, more UCI protocol commands will be added in the future.

Commands	Description	Comments
uci
ucinewgame	Initialize a new game	Reset transposition table
isready
position	Set the position	Support fen, startpos and moves
go	Start the search	See below for available options
go perft	Start the perft test	Usage: go perft <depth>
stop	Stop the search	Stop ponder thread
setoption	Set an option
quit	Quit the engine	Can be used at any time

go comand supports movetime (in ms), depth (in plies), infinite, wtime, btime, winc, binc and movestogo.

⚙️ Available options

Here is the list of currently available options. Use the command setoption name <option name> value <value> to change them.

Option	Type	Description	Comments
Hash	spin	Transposition table size (in MB)	Will only take effect after ucinewgame
Ponder	check	Enable pondering	Take effect after next go command
TimeControl	check	Enable time control	Take effect after next go command

📝 Example

uci # Prints available options and default values
setoption name Hash value 128
ucinewgame # Initialize a new game

position startpos moves e2e4 e7e5
# Or position fen rnbqkbnr/pppp1ppp/8/4p3/4P3/8/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKBNR b KQkq -

go movetime 5000 depth 50 # Search for 5 seconds or 50 plies