Very early WIP

Inspired by Sebastian Lague's Videos

My personal goal is to learn more about new types of programming and thought I'd start with a C# Chess bot as I'm familiar with the language and then write another bot in C, C++ or Rust. With the hope that more Chess programming experience and the "performance advantage" of the lower languages, I can beat the C# one.

And then maybe in the future ill make one in a functional language or use a Neural network or some other dumb idea.

Few Self Imposed Rules

• No stealing other peoples code or using AI. The whole point is to learn (I will commit the crime of using AI for unit testing however)
• WHen it comes to evaluation techniques, I want to try learning from older articles/papers and will try to remember to reference them on the readme.
• Test Driven Development:
  • Going to rely on tests to make sure everything is working as expected using real positions.
  • Also, it will help when I get to the optimization stages of development
• I want to try and keep records of benchmark results for each version of the bot to keep track of improvements and test bots against each-other

The plan

Phase One: Get Something That Works

• Get Basic Chess Engine Working With All The Rules Working
  • Calculate Basic Legal Moves For All Pieces
  • Pawn Shenanigans
    • Pawn Promotion
    • Diagonal Attacks
    • En Passant
  • Castling
  • Check And Checkmate
  • Illegal Moves
  • Game Draws
    • Stalemate
    • Threefold Repetition
    • Fifty-Move Rule
    • Insufficient Material
• Abstract Input System (Player Input And Random Move Input As a Start)
• Setup large validation tests to make sure the core engine is definitely bug free.
• Basic MiniMax Evaluation Player Input

Phase Two: Make It Not Suck

• Investigate Optimization For Prev Step
• Iterative Deepening
• Openings
• Optimize Core Engine
  • Use Bitboards
  • Revise Legal Move Generation (Assuming The First Iteration Is Bad And Precomputing Them With BitBoards Would Be Better)
• Probably more
• Make sure I can't beat it before continuing

Phase Three: Make It Actually Good

• Determine some performance metric goal, beat it and move on to the next language