gambit

README

gambit

gambit — material sacrificed for position. Also: two bots arguing in algebraic notation.

Two chess agents play each other, every move logged to the terminal in algebraic notation — headless by default, or in an optional Ebiten window. Built as a testbed for experimenting with search strategies.

Agents

Name	Description
random	Picks uniformly at random from the legal moves
greedy	Best immediate material gain, no lookahead
minimax	Alpha-beta search to a fixed depth
iterative	Iterative-deepening search
beam	Beam search over a bounded frontier
mcts	Monte Carlo tree search
human	You, in the GUI build

Install

Homebrew

# CLI (all platforms)
brew install danielriddell21/tap/gambit

# native macOS GUI window
brew install --cask danielriddell21/tap/gambit

Go install

go install github.com/danielriddell21/gambit/cmd/gambit@latest

From source

git clone https://github.com/danielriddell21/gambit
cd gambit
just run

A go install build is headless — the window sits behind the ebiten build tag.

Library

pkg/chess is the public package — board, moves, legality, FEN and results — and is documented on pkg.go.dev.

Documentation

Full documentation lives in the gambit wiki.