• C I N D E R •

Overview

Cinder is a hobby chess engine written in Rust.

Playing Strength

Version	SPCC	Ipmanchess	CCRL Blitz	CCRL 40/15	CEGT 40/20
v0.6.*	3773	3576	3763	3607	3615
v0.5.*	-	3556	3737	3602	3589
v0.4.*	-	-	3682	3559	3535
v0.3.*	-	-	3655	3545	3512
v0.2.*	-	-	3632	3522	3481
v0.1.*	-	-	-	3496	3439

Getting started

Prebuilt binaries

Prebuilt binaries for various popular platforms and CPU architectures are available on the releases page. Below is a reference for which binary to pick. The table is ordered from most compatible to most performant. You should prefer the most performant binary that runs on your machine.

Suffix	Description
*-sse4	Compatible with most Intel and AMD CPUs
*-avx2	Compatible with Intel Haswell (2013+) and AMD Excavator (2015+)
*-avx512	Compatible with Intel Ice Lake (2019+) and AMD Zen 4 (2022+)
*-neon	Compatible with ARMv8.2-A (2017+), including Apple M1 and newer

Building from source

Building Cinder from source currently requires a recent nightly Rust compiler. Run make to build a binary optimized for your CPU architecture. Run make help to view all available build targets. You'll find the binaries under target/bin/.

Usage

Cinder implements the UCI protocol and should be compatible with most chess graphical user interfaces (GUI). Users who are familiar with the UCI protocol may also interact with Cinder directly on a terminal via its command line interface (CLI).

UCI options

Name	Default	Unit	Description
Hash	16	MiB	Memory allocated for the transposition table
Threads	1	count	Number of search threads used to search
MoveOverhead	10	ms	Clock time assumed to be lost to system latency per move
SyzygyPath	<empty>	-	Path to a directory containing Syzygy tablebases

Acknowledgement

The efficiently updatable neural networks (NNUE) Cinder uses for position evaluation are trained with bullet, by Jamie Whiting, using data generated by the Leela Chess Zero project, which is available under the Open Database License (ODbL)

Cinder's implementation of the Syzygy tablebases probing algorithm is based on a fork of shakmaty-syzygy, by Niklas Fiekas.

Contribution

Cinder is an open source project and you're very welcome to contribute to this project by opening issues and/or pull requests, see CONTRIBUTING for general guidelines.

License

Cinder is distributed under the terms of the GPL-3.0 license, see LICENSE for details.