Rasher is a simple UCI chess engine written in Rust. It is not a standalone chess program, and needs a UCI-compatible chess GUI to be used comfortably, like Scid vs PC, Fritz, Tarrasch, Chessbase, or others.
I created this as a pet project in 2015 to learn Rust and experiment with computer chess. The engine plays at roughly 1200 ELO strength, slightly stronger than a beginner human player, but any serious player can easily defeat it.
Any feedback is welcome.
Note: Pre-compiled Windows binaries are available for download in the release section on Github. They should be reasonably up to date.
Building the project from source requires the Rust compiler and Cargo (Rust's package manager) installed, both included in the Rust downloads.
To build and run:
cargo build --release
cargo run --release
The engine uses the UCI interface, and should be run from a GUI, but it can also be (inconveniently) run in a terminal. To evaluate the starting position, run the program and enter:
uci
position startpos
go infinite
To evaluate the position after 1.e4 e5:
uci
position startpos moves e2e4 e7e5
go infinite
Use cargo test to run tests, cargo test --release to run without debugging checks, and cargo test --release -- --ignored to run the most time consuming perf tests.