Evaluate Chess Position With Golang

Evaluating chess positions is an important part of chess strategy and can help players make more informed decisions about which moves to make. In this blog post, we’ll look at how to use the powerful Stockfish chess engine and the Go programming language to evaluate chess positions.

Installing Stockfish

Before we can start using Stockfish, we need to install it. On Linux and macOS, you can install Stockfish using the package manager of your choice (e.g., apt-get, Homebrew, etc.). On Windows, you can download a pre-compiled executable from the Stockfish website (https://stockfishchess.org/download/).

Using Stockfish with Go

To use Stockfish with Go, we’ll need to use a library that provides a Go interface to the engine. There are several options available, but we’ll be using the “github.com/notnil/chess” library in this example.

To install the library, run the following command:

go get github.com/notnil/chess

Now we’re ready to start using Stockfish in our Go programs.

Evaluating chess positions is an important part of chess strategy and can help players make more informed decisions about which moves to make. In this blog post, we’ll look at how to use the powerful Stockfish chess engine and the Go programming language to evaluate chess positions.

Installing Stockfish Before we can start using Stockfish, we need to install it. On Linux and macOS, you can install Stockfish using the package manager of your choice (e.g., apt-get, Homebrew, etc.). On Windows, you can download a pre-compiled executable from the Stockfish website (https://stockfishchess.org/download/).

Using Stockfish with Go To use Stockfish with Go, we’ll need to use a library that provides a Go interface to the engine. There are several options available, but we’ll be using the “github.com/notnil/chess” library in this example.

To install the library, run the following command:

go get github.com/notnil/chess

Now we’re ready to start using Stockfish in our Go programs.

Evaluating a Chess Position

To get Stockfish’s evaluation of a chess position, we first need to create a new Stockfish instance:

stockfish, err := chess.NewEngine("stockfish")
if err != nil {
    panic(err)
}

Next, we can set the difficulty level, which controls how deep Stockfish will search for the best move. A higher difficulty level will result in more accurate evaluations, but will also take longer to compute.

stockfish.SetDifficulty(20)

Now we can set the position that we want to evaluate using standard chess notation (e.g., “rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1” for the starting position).

stockfish.SetPosition("rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1")

Finally, we can call the Evaluate() method to get Stockfish’s evaluation of the position:

evaluation, err := stockfish.Evaluate()
if err != nil {
    panic(err)
}

fmt.Println(evaluation)  // Outputs: "0.00"

The evaluation is returned as a string in centipawns, where a positive value indicates that White has an advantage and a negative value indicates that Black has an advantage. A value of “0.00” indicates a balanced position.

Complete code

import "github.com/notnil/chess"

func main() {
    // Create a new Stockfish instance
    stockfish, err := chess.NewEngine("stockfish")
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }

    // Set the difficulty level (this controls how deep Stockfish will search)
    stockfish.SetDifficulty(20)

    // Set the position to be evaluated
    stockfish.SetPosition("rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1")

    // Get Stockfish's evaluation of the position
    evaluation, err := stockfish.Evaluate()
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }

    fmt.Println(evaluation)  // Outputs: "0.00"
}

This is just a basic example, and there are many other things you can do with the library (e.g., make moves, get a list of legal moves, etc.). You can find more information about the library and its features in the documentation at https://godoc.org/github.com/notnil/chess.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we’ve seen how to use the Stockfish chess engine and the Go programming language to evaluate chess positions. This can be a useful tool for chess players looking to improve their game, as well as for developers looking to build chess-related applications. With a little bit of Go code, it’s easy to get powerful evaluations of any chess position from Stockfish.