Tinman

A Rusty chess engine

Tinman is a chess engine by Mike Leany, written in Rust and loosely based on his previous chess engine Vapor, which was written in C. It currently supports the Chess Engine Communication Protocol (XBoard/WinBoard). UCI support will be coming in a future release.

Installation

The latest release can be downloaded from the Releases page on GitHub. If you are using a pre-compiled executable, unzip it to wherever you want to run it from and skip to the next section.

If you are compiling from source, unzip the source from the releases page, or clone the repository. In a terminal, go to the directory where you put the source code and run the following command.

cargo build --release

The executable will be located in "target/release/" within the directory where the source code is. In UNIX-like operating systems it should be named "tinman"; in Windows it will be "tinman.exe".

A User Interface

To run the engine, you will probably want some kind of graphical user interface. Two possibilities are XBoard/WinBoard or Arena. If you use another interface, just make sure it supports the XBoard protocol. Refer to the documentation for the specific user interface you choose for instructions on how to set up new engines. You will need to give the interface the command to run which, in the simplest case, is just the path of the executable.

Execution

tinman [OPTIONS] [SUBCOMMAND]

Options and Flags

Short	Long	Arg	Description
-h	--help	No	Prints help information
-V	--version	No	Prints version information
	--log-file	Yes	Sets the log file if logging is turned on (default: "tinman.log")
-l	--log-level	Yes	Sets the log level or turns off logging (default: info)

The log level can be any of the following, from the least verbose to the most: off, error, warn, info, debug, or trace.

The counts Subcommand

The counts subcommand is used to count the number of variations to a specific depth from one or more positions. It is called perft in most chess engines. The command looks like the following.

tinman counts -d <DEPTH> [FEN_STRING]...

DEPTH is required, but FEN_STRING is optional. If FEN_STRING is not given, counts the variations from the standard starting position. FEN_STRING must be passed as a single argument, which means it should be enclosed in quotes. If multiple FEN strings are passed, each is counted in turn.

Examples

Run with logging turned off:

tinman -l off

Run with maximum logging sent to a file named "verbose.log":

tinman -l trace --log-file verbose.log

Count the variations to depth of 3 for the standard starting position:

tinman counts -d 3

Count the variations to depth 6 for two different positions:

tinman counts -d 6 "4k3/8/8/8/8/8/8/4K2R w K - 0 1" "n1n5/PPPk4/8/8/8/8/4Kppp/5N1N b - - 0 1"