Create a homemade engine

Creating a homemade engine

As an alternative to creating an entire chess engine and implementing one of the communication protocols (UCI or XBoard), a bot can also be created by writing a single class with a single method. The search() method in this new class takes the current board and the game clock as arguments and should return a move based on whatever criteria the coder desires.

Steps to create a homemade bot:

1. Do all the steps in the How to Install
2. In the config.yml, change the engine protocol to homemade
3. Create a class in homemade.py that extends MinimalEngine.
4. Create a method called search() with an argument board that chooses a legal move from the board.
   • There are examples in homemade.py to help you get started. These examples show different ways to implement the search() method and the proper way to return the chosen move.
5. In the config.yml, change the name from engine_name to the name of your class
   • In this case, you could change it to: name: "RandomMove"