Java Chess Engine

Inspiration

I have always enjoyed the game of chess and have been amazed by the power of computers, so I decided to create a work-in-progress chess engine in java using guidlines from the Chessprogrmming Wiki. Currently, it uses "Negamax" and searches up to a ply of 4 in a second consistently. The move generation is completely debugged using the perft algorithm (it was worth it). The average perft speed using complicated positions is around 3 million moves/second on my Macbook Air (CPU: 1.8 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5, RAM: 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3).

Board Representation

• Uses bitboards stored in a Java long to store positions of a certain piece type
• All piece types extend the Piece class
• The board uses make and unmake move methods rather than copy-make (which failed in my first attempt)
• All piece objects are stored in static variables within their class (like a singleton)
• Color and PieceEnum are used to store the type of piece

The Code

You can view the github repository for this chess engine here at github.com/Isaac-Muscat/Java-Chess-Engine.