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Fastchess

Fastchess

Fastchess is a versatile command-line tool designed for running chess engine tournaments.
Written primarily in C++17, it utilizes doctest as its testing framework.

With Fastchess, you can effortlessly orchestrate chess tournaments, configure time controls, and execute matches concurrently for optimal time efficiency. Extensively tested for high concurrency (supporting up to 250 threads) with short time controls (0.2+0.002s), it exhibits minimal timeout issues, with only 10 matches out of 20,000 experiencing timeouts.

What's New

  • UCI Compliance Checker: Fastchess now offers a built-in UCI compliance checker,
    allowing you to verify that engines adhere to the UCI protocol.
    To use this feature, simply run the following command: ./fastchess --compliance ENGINE_PATH [ENGINE_ARGS]

  • Enhanced Cutechess Output: The Cutechess output support has been refined to enhance compatibility with other tools. Simply switch the -output option to cutechess to enable it.

  • Extended PGN Data: You can now track nodes, seldepth, nps (nodes per second), hashfull, tbhits, and time left in the PGN output. Refer to the -pgnout option for detailed information.

  • Quick Match Option: We've introduced a -quick option for running quick matches between two engines with a specified book. Specify -quick cmd=ENGINE1 cmd=ENGINE2 book=BOOK to swiftly initiate a match.

  • GZIP Compression for logs: The logs can now be compressed using GZIP to reduce disk space usage. You can enable this feature adding ZLIB=true to the make command and the enabling the compress=true option for the log. Compiling with ZLIB=true will include gzstream a wrapper for zlib from
    Deepak Bandyopadhyay and Lutz Kettner, which is licensed under LGPL.

Quick start

Building from source

Building Fastchess from source is straightforward. Just follow these steps:

  1. Clone the repository git clone https://github.com/Disservin/fastchess.git
  2. Navigate to the Fastchess directory cd fastchess
  3. Build the executable make -j for GCC and make -j CXX=clang++ for Clang (requires GCC >= 7.3.0 or Clang >= 8.0.0).

The executable will be located in the root directory.

If you are on Linux, you can run make install to install the binary on your system.
By default, the installation prefix is set to /usr/local. You can change this location by specifying the PREFIX during installation. The binary will be installed in $(PREFIX)/bin, and the man page will be installed in $(PREFIX)/share/man/man1.

make install PREFIX=/custom/path

This will install the binary in /custom/path/bin and the man page in /custom/path/share/man/man1. If PREFIX is not specified, it defaults to /usr/local.

Download the latest release

Prefer a pre-compiled version?

Download the latest release from our release page.

Current dev versions are available as artifacts from the CI.

Example usage

Here's an example of how to use Fastchess:

fastchess.exe -engine cmd=Engine1.exe name=Engine1 -engine cmd=Engine2.exe
name=Engine2 -each tc=10+0.1 -rounds 200 -repeat -concurrency 4

Note: It is highly encouraged to use an opening book.

Command line options

See man.md for a detailed description of all command line options.

Contributing

We welcome contributions to fastchess! Please ensure that any changes you make are beneficial to the development and pass the CI tests.

The code follows the Google style and is formatted with clang-format. When creating pull requests, please format your code accordingly.

To contribute, you'll need a recent GCC compiler that supports C++17 and the ability to run the Makefile. You can locally test your changes by running make -j tests, followed by executing the ./fastchess-tests executable to verify your changes pass the tests.

You can format the code with clang-format by running make format. After making changes to the man file, you need to run make update-man.

Maintainers & contributors

The following people have push access to the repository:

Special thanks to gahtan-syarif for his many contributions and thorough testing.