🐎🛡️ Caval ëd Bronz - Simple Python Chess Engine

A lightweight Python chess engine using the python-chess library for board representation.

1. 🤖 Minimax Search with Alpha-Beta Pruning and Iterative Deepening

The primary engine is the MinimaxPlayer, which employs the Minimax algorithm to determine the optimal move for a given search depth.

• ✂️ Alpha-Beta Pruning: The search is dramatically accelerated by implementing Alpha-Beta Pruning, which efficiently prunes branches of the search tree that cannot possibly influence the final decision.
• ⚙️ Configurable Depth: The engine is initialized with a configurable search limit (depth), defaulting to 3 half-moves.
• 🔄 Iterative Deepening with Move Ordering: The engine employs a form of Iterative Deepening Search (IDS). It incrementally searches from depth 1 up to the full configured depth. This allows the results from shallower searches to be used for move ordering in deeper searches, significantly improving the performance of the Alpha-Beta Pruning.

2. 📊 Static Board Evaluation

The BoardEvaluator class provides the static score for the terminal nodes of the search tree (or the non-terminal nodes at the search limit).

• ⚖️ Material Value Function: The evaluation is based purely on material advantage, summing the values of all pieces on the board.
• 👑 Piece Values:
  • King: 20,000
  • Queen: 900
  • Rook: 500
  • Bishop: 330
  • Knight: 320
  • Pawn: 100

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👥 Player Implementations

The project defines an abstract Player class and includes several concrete implementations for testing and competition.

🧠 Intelligent Player

• MinimaxPlayer: The main AI, using the Minimax search algorithm with Alpha-Beta Pruning and Iterative Deepening.

👶 Baseline Players

• DumbCapturePlayer: A greedy opponent that implements a basic heuristic: it prioritizes moves that result in a check, followed by any capture, falling back to a random legal move only if neither of the better options exist.
• RandomPlayer: The simplest opponent, which selects a move uniformly at random from all legal moves on the board.

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🛠️ Utilities

• ChessMatch: A utility class to orchestrate and run a single game between any two initialized Player instances until a game outcome is reached.
• ChessTournament: A class designed to run multiple matches (num_matches) between two players and calculate the final win/loss/draw statistics.