UCI Chess Engine
VeryChess
A project focused on developing chess engine playing on personal PCs, evaluation and testing chess engines. Built by Oleh Sych.
About VeryChess
VeryChess is a UCI-compatible chess engine developed as a personal software project at the intersection of chess and programming. The engine is designed to work with UCI-compatible chess GUIs such as Arena, Cute Chess, and BanksiaGUI.
Development is focused on building a clean, understandable architecture, improving engine strength through systematic testing, and documenting every step of the journey publicly.
About the Author- UCI-compatible — works with standard chess GUIs
- Tested in round-robin tournaments
- Releases documented with full change notes
- Results published with PGN game files
Latest Release
All releases →VeryChess 0.10.0
What's new
This release is anchored by one change — a reworked quiet-move history heuristic — that is worth more than any single mechanism the engine has shipped before: +120 Elo. Around it, `evaluate()` was restructured for speed with no change in the numbers it produces, two new positional terms were added.In a gauntlet tournament against other well-known chess engines (the permanent testing group used for VeryChess benchmarking) on an ARM64 Mac with an M2 CPU, VeryChess 0.10.0 achieved a rating of 2909 ± 27 ELO.
Latest Tournament
All tournaments →VeryChess 0.2.0 benchmark tournament
Tournament for benchmarking VeryChess 0.2.0, the first version of the engine to support multi-threaded search.
VeryChess PremiumLeague #1
First public tournament for against 46 engines (including VeryChess) of top strongest engines build for MacOS to establish a performance baseline.
Project Goals
- Build a clean, understandable chess engine architecture
- Improve engine strength step by step through testing and measurement
- Run repeatable, documented engine tournaments
- Publish releases, experiments, and progress openly