An attempt to build a UCI-compliant chess engine from the ground up in pure Rust. The primary goal here is to learn how chess engines are written, and not necessarily to optimize performance (maybe one day that goal will change). As such, there is a lot of fluff in here that should increase comprehension.
In order to perform perft testing which counts the number of engine-valid moves from a given FEN string to a specified depth, lasker uses the same mechanism as Stockfish which appends it to the go uci command.
So, in order to run perft, build the binary or do
cargo runand then lasker will receive the command via stdin. The first step is to use the position command to tell the engine what to set the current position as. E.g.
position fen rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1then, running perft a specified depth uses the go command.
go perft 2This will print the number of valid moves from the starting position to a depth of 2.
A test script (mostly copied from Stockfish) is contained within tests/perft.sh that covers the cases the engine handles (eventually it will actually be correct!),
bash tests/perft.sh