Rockfish

A microscopic chess engine that barely knows what it's doing.

Rockfish is a deliberately tiny and obscure chess engine written in Python. It uses a simple minimax search, material counting, and a tiny amount of center-control evaluation. No opening book, no transposition tables, no alpha-beta pruning, and absolutely no grandmaster aspirations.

Features

• Legal chess move generation
• Material-based evaluation
• Center control evaluation
• Minimax search
• Tiny codebase

What Rockfish Does Not Have

• Alpha-beta pruning
• Transposition tables
• Piece-square tables
• Quiescence search
• Opening books
• Endgame tablebases

Installation

Install Python 3 and the required dependency:

pip install chess

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/username/Rockfish.git
cd Rockfish

Running

python Rockfish.py

The engine will play moves automatically until the game ends.

Evaluation Function

Rockfish evaluates positions using:

Material

Piece	Value
Pawn	100
Knight	320
Bishop	330
Rook	500
Queen	900
King	0

Center Control

Additional points are awarded for attacking:

• d4
• e4
• d5
• e5

Strength

Estimated playing strength:

• Approximately 300–700 Elo
• Strong enough to play legal chess

Design Philosophy

Most engines attempt to find the best move.

Rockfish attempts to find a move.

Example Output

r n b q k b n r
p p p p p p p p
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
P P P P P P P P
R N B Q K B N R

Engine: e2e4

Roadmap

Possible future improvements:

• Alpha-beta pruning
• Better evaluation
• Move ordering
• Opening knowledge
• Basic tactical awareness

License

Do whatever you want with it. But do inform me of what you plan on doing please.

If Rockfish accidentally defeats Stockfish, please open an issue immediately please.