Nightmare
A UCI chess engine with a modern search, lazy SMP and a neural network evaluation.
- Version
- 9.0.0
- Status
- In development
- Protocol
- UCI
- Platforms
- Windows x64
- Author
- Joost Buijs
Nightmare is a chess engine written in C++20. Version 9 is a new engine that reuses parts of the earlier 8.x code and replaces the rest with a modern design.
Features
- Search — principal variation search with a transposition table, a staged move picker and the usual modern pruning and reduction techniques.
- Multi-threading — lazy SMP with persistent search threads; scales to many cores.
- Evaluation — a neural network that uses per-piece attack maps as input features, trained on positions generated by the engine itself.
- Chess960 — supported by the move generator and the UCI interface.
- Endgame tablebases — Syzygy support is planned.
UCI options
| Option | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Hash | 256 | Transposition table size in MB |
| Threads | 1 | Number of search threads |
| UCI_Chess960 | false | Play Fischer random chess |
History
Nightmare has been around for many years. A Free Pascal sibling of the engine is known as Goldbar.