Are you a user or a developer?
There's only two simple steps in order to play against our chess engine.
Installation is as simple as
pip install -r requirements.txt .
To play a game against an alphabeta of depth3 opponent, simply type
python3 examples/qtgui.py
The pieces need to be dragged (click mouse on the piece's current square, and lift mouse button on goal square).
If for any reason the gui experiences problems, once can also use a simpler keyboard-based input method jupyter notebooks (see the gui section for more info). First download jupyter, then open the examples/play_against_computer.ipynb notebook:
cd examples
jupyter notebook
# open play_against_computer.ipynb through the jupyter API
and play!
Moves have to be entered manually, using either of
- Standard Algebraic Notation (e4, Nf3, exd5, etc.)
- Universal Chess Interface (e2e4, g1f3, e4d5, etc.)
As a developer it's better to install superchess using
pip install -e -r requirements.txt .
This will keep track of the changes you make to files, and you won't need to reinstall superchess after every change.
Unit tests can be run from the tests folder by running
python3 -m unittest
We use python-chess as a frontend, which generates svg images, and so the GUI needs to show this svg image and then ask the user for move input. There are two GUIs implemented, one for which the input is click-based and another for which it is keyboard-based.
The mouse/click-based GUI is the main one, and is implemented using PySide2. The code can be found in examples/qtgui.py.
The keyboard-based gui uses IPython's Display function, and needs to be ran inside a jupyter notebook.
Can you find the checkmate in 1?
The classical alphabeta algorithm with a depth of 3 misses it! This is because moving the King or Rook on h1 first still leads to a checkmate, and alphabeta doesn't distinguish between checkmates that happen in one move or those that happen in three! This is why our implementation alphabeta_treesearch returns (best_score, depth, best_moves), where depth is used to distinguish between moves with the same score that otherwise look equivalent to alphabeta.