Snowy is a UCI chess engine written in C++. It uses an array-based board representation (ie, not bitboard), and searches in a straightforward minimax manner, with no depth extensions or reductions. The playing strength has not been precisely evaluated, but it is somewhere between faile and Vice.
It is available under the terms of the MIT license.
Windows binaries can be found in the Releases section.
On Linux, you can build and run with:
$ make
$ ./build/release
Other UNIX-like systems with GNU Make may work, but have not been tested.
The default is to build with Clang, if you wish to use GCC you can build with:
$ make CXX=g++
This engine would not have been possible without the knowledge freely shared by others:
- The truly excellent Chess Programming Wiki
- The Computer Chess Club
- The simple and approachable TSCP engine
- The strong and very well commented Crafty engine
If you pursue only one of those resources, let it be the Chess Programming Wiki. I cannot overstate what a great help it has been to a beginner like myself.