Rudim

Rudim is a chess engine written in Rust.

You can play against Rudim on lichess: rudim-bot.

Architecture Overview

Rudim currently implements these core engine capabilities:

• Bitboard-based board representation & Magic bitboards
• Incremental make/unmake move pipeline with board history with a pseudo-legal move generator
• Draw detection (including repetition and fifty-move rule handling)
• Zobrist hashing and transposition table integration
• Iterative deepening search
• Negamax with alpha-beta pruning and principal variation search
• Quiescence search
• Move ordering heuristics (MVV-LVA, killer moves, history heuristic)
• Null-move pruning
• UCI protocol command handling (uci, isready, position, go, stop, ucinewgame, debug, quit)
• Rofchade Piece Square Tables and Simple Pawn Structure Evaluations

Prerequisites

• Rust stable toolchain (rustup + cargo)

Build and Run

• Build: cargo build
• Release build: cargo build --release
• Run engine (UCI loop): cargo run
• Run perft suite: cargo run -- --perft
• Generate magic numbers: cargo run -- --generate-magics

Quality Checks

• Tests: cargo test
• Lint (Clippy): cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features
• Format: cargo fmt --all
• Format check: cargo fmt --all -- --check

Benchmarks

Rudim uses Criterion benchmarks.

• Run all benches: cargo bench
• Main benchmark suite (find_best_move at depth 6-7 on standard positions) lives in benches/search_benchmark.rs.

Contributing

PRs are welcome.

Before opening a PR, please run:

• cargo fmt --all -- --check
• cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features
• cargo test

If your change affects search strength, run a tournament/regression check as well.