Changes:
- Replaced lookup table chess.BB_BETWEEN[a][b] with a function chess.between(a, b). Improves initialization and runtime performance.
- chess.pgn.BaseVisitor.result() is now an abstract method, forcing subclasses to implement it.
- Removed helper attributes from chess.engine.InfoDict. Instead it is now a TypedDict.
- chess.engine.PovScore equality is now semantic instead of structural: Scores compare equal to the negative score from the opposite point of view.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed stack overflow in chess.pgn when exporting, visiting or getting the
- final board of a very long game.
- Clarified documentation regarding board validity.
- chess.pgn.GameNode.__repr__() no longer errors if the root node has invalid FEN or Variant headers.
- Carriage returns are no longer allowed in PGN header values, fixing reparsability.
- Fixed type error when XBoard name or egt features have a value that looks like an integer.
- chess.engine is now passing type checks with mypy.
- chess.gaviota is now passing type checks with mypy.
Features:
- Added chess.Board.gives_check().
- chess.engine.AnalysisResult.wait() now returns chess.engine.BestMove.
- Added empty_square parameter for chess.Board.unicode() with better aligned default (⭘).
Changes:
- Positions with more than two checkers are considered invalid and board.status() returns chess.STATUS_TOO_MANY_CHECKERS.
- Pawns drops in Crazyhouse are considered zeroing and reset board.halfmove_clock when played.
- Now validating file sizes when opening Syzygy tables and Polyglot opening books.
- Explicitly warn about untrusted tablebase files and chess engines.
Bugfixes:
- Fix Racing Kings game end detection: Black cannot catch up if their own pieces block the goal. White would win on the next turn, so this did not impact the game theoretical outcome of the game.
- Fix bugs discovered by fuzzing the EPD parser: Fixed serialization of empty strings, reparsability of empty move lists, handling of non-finite floats, and handling of whitespace in opcodes.
Features:
- Added board.checkers(), returning a set of squares with the pieces giving check.
Changes:
- Dropped support for Python 3.5.
- Remove explicit loop arguments in chess.engine module, following https://bugs.python.org/issue36373.
Bugfixes:
- chess.engine.EngineProtocol.returncode is no longer poisoned when EngineProtocol.quit() times out.
- chess.engine.PlayResult.info was not always of type chess.engine.InfoDict.
Features:
- The background thread spawned by chess.engine.SimpleEngine is now named for improved debuggability, revealing the PID of the engine process.
- chess.engine.EventLoopPolicy now supports asyncio.PidfdChildWatcher when running on Python 3.9+ and Linux 5.3+.
- Add chess.Board.san_and_push().
Changes:
- chess.variant.GiveawayBoard now starts with castling rights. chess.variant.AntichessBoard is the same variant without castling rights.
- UCI info parser no longer reports errors when encountering unknown tokens.
- Performance improvements for repetition detection.
- Since Python 3.8: chess.syzygy/chess.polyglot use madvise(MADV_RANDOM) to prepare table/book files for random access.
Bugfixes:
- Fix syntax error in type annotation of chess.engine.run_in_background().
- Fix castling rights when king is exploded in Atomic. Mitigated by the fact that the game is over and that it did not affect FEN.
- Fix insufficient material with underpromoted pieces in Crazyhouse. Mitigated by the fact that affected positions are unreachable in Crazyhouse.
Features:
- Support wdl in UCI info (usually activated with UCI_ShowWDL).
Bugfixes:
- Follow FICS rules in Atomic castling edge cases.
- Handle self-reported errors by XBoard engines "Error: ..." or "Illegal move: ...".
Bugfixes:
- Fixed exception propagation, when a UCI engine sends an invalid bestmove. Thanks @fsmosca.
Changes:
- chess.Move.from_uci() no longer accepts moves from and to the same square, for example a1a1. 0000 is now the only valid null move notation.
Bugfixes:
- The minimum Python version is 3.5.3 (instead of 3.5.0).
- Fix board.is_irreversible() when capturing a rook that had castling rights.
Changes:
- is_en_passant(), is_capture(), is_zeroing(), is_irreversible(), is_castling(), is_kingside_castling() and is_queenside_castling() now consistently return False for null moves.
- Added chess.engine.InfoDict class with typed shorthands for common keys.
- Support [Variant "3-check"] (from chess.com PGNs).
Changes:
- Dropped support for Python 3.4 (end of life reached).
- chess.polyglot.Entry.move is now a property instead of a method. The raw move is now always decoded in the context of the position (relevant for castling moves).
- Piece, Move, BaseBoard and Board comparisons no longer support duck typing.
- FENs sent to engines now always include potential en-passant squares, even if no legal en-passant capture exists.
- Circular SVG arrows now have a circle CSS class.
- Superfluous dashes (-) in EPDs are no longer treated as opcodes.
- Removed GameCreator, HeaderCreator and BoardCreator aliases for {Game,Headers,Board}Builder.
Bugfixes:
- Notation like Kh1 is no longer accepted for castling moves.
- Remove stale files from wheels published on PyPI.
- Parsing Three-Check EPDs with moves was always failing.
- Some methods in chess.variant were returning bool-ish integers, when they should have returned bool.
- chess.engine: Fix line decoding when Windows line-endings arrive seperately in stdout buffer.
- chess.engine: Survive timeout in analysis.
- chess.engine: Survive unexpected bestmove sent by misbehaving UCI engines.
New features:
- Experimental type signatures for almost all public APIs (typing). Some modules do not yet internally pass typechecking.
- Added Board.color_at(square).
- Added chess.engine.AnalysisResult.get() and empty().
- chess.engine: The UCI_AnalyseMode option is still automatically managed, but can now be overwritten.
- chess.engine.EngineProtocol and constructors now optionally take an explicit loop argument.
Changes:
- XBoardProtocol will no longer raise an exception when the engine resigned. Instead it sets a new flag PlayResult.resigned. resigned and draw_offered are keyword-only arguments.
- Renamed chess.pgn.{Game,Header,Board}Creator to {Game,Headers,Board}Builder. Aliases kept in place.
Bugfixes:
- Make XBoardProtocol robust against engines that send a move after claiming a draw or resigning. Thanks @pascalgeo.
- XBoardProtocol no longer ignores Hint: sent by the engine.
- Fix handling of illegal moves in XBoardProtocol.
- Fix exception when engine is shut down while pondering.
- Fix unhandled internal exception and file descriptor leak when engine initialization fails.
- Fix HordeBoard.status() when black pieces are on the first rank. Thanks @Wisling.
New features:
- Added chess.pgn.Game.builder(), chess.pgn.Headers.builder() and chess.pgn.GameNode.dangling_node() to simplify subclassing GameNode.
- EngineProtocol.communicate() is now also available in the synchronous API.
Bugfixes:
- chess.engine.XBoardProtocol.play() was searching 100 times longer than intended when using chess.engine.Limit.time, and searching 100 times more nodes than intended when using chess.engine.Limit.nodes. Thanks @pascalgeo.
Bugfixes:
- chess.engine.XBoardProtocol.play() was raising KeyError when using time controls with increment or remaining moves. Thanks @pascalgeo.
This is the second release candidate for python-chess 1.0. If you see the need for breaking changes, please speak up now!
Bugfixes:
- EngineProtocol.analyse(*, multipv) was not passing this argument to the engine and therefore only returned the first principal variation. Thanks @svangordon.
- chess.svg.board(*, squares): The X symbol on selected squares is now more visible when it overlaps pieces.
Changes:
- FEN/EPD parsing is now more relaxed: Incomplete FENs and EPDs are completed with reasonable defaults (w - - 0 1). The EPD parser accepts fields with moves in UCI notation (for example the technically invalid bm g1f3 instead of bm Nf3).
- The PGN parser now skips games with invalid FEN headers and variations after an illegal move (after handling the error as usual).
New features:
- Added Board.is_repetition(count=3).
- Document that chess.engine.EngineProtocol is compatible with AsyncSSH 1.16.0.
This is the first release candidate for python-chess 1.0. If you see the need for breaking changes, please speak up now!
Changes:
- chess.engine is now stable and replaces chess.uci and chess.xboard.
- Advanced: EngineProtocol.initialize() is now public for use with custom transports.
- Removed __ne__ implementations (not required since Python 3).
- Assorted documentation and coding-style improvements.
New features:
- Check insufficient material for a specific side: board.has_insufficient_material(color).
- Copy boards with limited stack depth: board.copy(stack=depth).
Bugfixes:
- Properly handle delayed engine errors, for example unsupported options.
Bugfixes:
- chess.engine did not correctly handle Windows-style line endings. Thanks @Bstylestuff.
New features:
- This release introduces a new experimental API for chess engine communication, chess.engine, based on asyncio. It is intended to eventually replace chess.uci and chess.xboard.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed race condition in LRU-cache of open Syzygy tables. The LRU-cache is enabled by default (max_fds).
- Fix deprecation warning and unclosed file in setup.py. Thanks Mickaël Schoentgen.
Changes:
- chess.pgn.read_game() now ignores BOM at the start of the stream.
- Removed deprecated items.
Bugfixes:
- CrazyhouseBoard.root() and ThreeCheckBoard.root() were not returning the correct pockets and number of remaining checks, respectively. Thanks @gbtami.
- chess.pgn.skip_game() now correctly skips PGN comments that contain line-breaks and PGN header tag notation.
Changes:
- Renamed chess.pgn.GameModelCreator to GameCreator. Alias kept in place and will be removed in a future release.
- Renamed chess.engine to chess._engine. Use re-exports from chess.uci or chess.xboard.
- Renamed Board.stack to Board._stack. Do not use this directly.
- Improved memory usage: Board.legal_moves and Board.pseudo_legal_moves no longer create reference cycles. PGN visitors can manage headers themselves.
- Removed previously deprecated items.
Features:
- Added chess.pgn.BaseVisitor.visit_board() and chess.pgn.BoardCreator.
Bugfixes:
- Fix chess.Board.set_epd() and chess.Board.from_epd() with semicolon in string operand. Thanks @jdart1.
- chess.pgn.GameNode.uci() was always raising an exception. Also included in v0.24.0.
This release drops support for Python 2. The 0.23.x branch will be maintained for one more month.
Changes:
- Require Python 3.4. Thanks @hugovk.
- No longer using extra pip features: pip install python-chess[engine,gaviota] is now pip install python-chess.
- Various keyword arguments can now be used as keyword arguments only.
- chess.pgn.GameNode.accept() now also visits the move leading to that node.
- chess.pgn.GameModelCreator now requires that begin_game() be called.
- chess.pgn.scan_headers() and chess.pgn.scan_offsets() have been removed. Instead the new functions chess.pgn.read_headers() and chess.pgn.skip_game() can be used for a similar purpose.
- chess.syzygy: Invalid magic headers now raise IOError. Previously they were only checked in an assertion. type(board).{tbw_magic,tbz_magic,pawnless_tbw_magic,pawnless_tbz_magic} are now byte literals.
- board.status() constants (STATUS_) are now typed using enum.IntFlag. Values remain unchanged.
- chess.svg.Arrow is no longer a namedtuple.
- chess.PIECE_SYMBOLS[0] and chess.PIECE_NAMES[0] are now None instead of empty strings.
- Performance optimizations:
- chess.pgn.Game.from_board(),
- chess.square_name()
- Replace collections.deque with lists almost everywhere.
- Renamed symbols (aliases will be removed in the next release):
- chess.BB_VOID -> BB_EMPTY
- chess.bswap() -> flip_vertical()
- chess.pgn.GameNode.main_line() -> mainline_moves()
- chess.pgn.GameNode.is_main_line() -> is_mainline()
- chess.variant.BB_HILL -> chess.BB_CENTER
- chess.syzygy.open_tablebases() -> open_tablebase()
- chess.syzygy.Tablebases -> Tablebase
- chess.syzygy.Tablebase.open_directory() -> add_directory()
- chess.gaviota.open_tablebases() -> open_tablebase()
- chess.gaviota.open_tablebases_native() -> open_tablebase_native()
- chess.gaviota.NativeTablebases -> NativeTablebase
- chess.gaviota.PythonTablebases -> PythonTablebase
- chess.gaviota.NativeTablebase.open_directory() -> add_directory()
- chess.gaviota.PythonTablebase.open_directory() -> add_directory()
Bugfixes:
- The PGN parser now gives the visitor a chance to handle unknown chess variants and continue parsing.
- chess.pgn.GameNode.uci() was always raising an exception.
New features:
- chess.SquareSet now extends collections.abc.MutableSet and can be initialized from iterables.
- board.apply_transform(f) and board.transform(f) can apply bitboard transformations to a position. Examples: chess.flip_{vertical,horizontal,diagonal,anti_diagonal}.
- chess.pgn.GameNode.mainline() iterates over nodes of the mainline. Can also be used with reversed(). Reversal is now also supported for chess.pgn.GameNode.mainline_moves().
- chess.svg.Arrow(tail, head, color="#888") gained an optional color argument.
- chess.pgn.BaseVisitor.parse_san(board, san) is used by parsers and can be overwritten to deal with non-standard input formats.
- chess.pgn: Visitors can advise the parser to skip games or variations by returning the special value chess.pgn.SKIP from begin_game(), end_headers() or begin_variation(). This is only a hint. The corresponding end_game() or end_variation() will still be called.
- Added chess.svg.MARGIN.
Bugfixes:
- chess.SquareSet now correctly handles negative masks. Thanks @hasnul.
- chess.pgn now accepts [Variant "chess 960"] (with the space).
Changes:
- Updated Board.is_fivefold_repetition(). FIDE rules have changed and the repetition no longer needs to occur on consecutive alternating moves. Thanks @LegionMammal978.
Bugfixes:
- chess.syzygy: Correctly initialize wide DTZ map for experimental 7 piece table KRBBPvKQ.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed ThreeCheckBoard.mirror() and CrazyhouseBoard.mirror(), which were previously resetting remaining checks and pockets respectively. Thanks @QueensGambit.
Changes:
- Board.move_stack is now guaranteed to be UCI compatible with respect to the representation of castling moves and board.chess960.
- Drop support for Python 3.3, which is long past end of life.
- chess.uci: The position command now manages UCI_Chess960 and UCI_Variant automatically.
- chess.uci: The position command will now always send the entire history of moves from the root position.
- Various coding style fixes and improvements. Thanks @hugovk.
New features:
- Added Board.root().
Bugfixes:
- Gaviota: Fix Python based Gaviota tablebase probing when there are multiple en passant captures. Thanks @bjoernholzhauer.
- Syzygy: Fix DTZ for some mate in 1 positions. Similarly to the fix from v0.23.1 this is mostly cosmetic.
- Syzygy: Fix DTZ off-by-one in some 6 piece antichess positions with moves that threaten to force a capture. This is mostly cosmetic.
Changes:
- Let uci.Engine.position() send history of at least 8 moves if available. Previously it sent only moves that were relevant for repetition detection. This is mostly useful for Lc0. Once performance issues are solved, a future version will always send the entire history. Thanks @SashaMN and @Mk-Chan.
- Various documentation fixes and improvements.
New features:
- Added polyglot.MemoryMappedReader.get(board, default=None).
Bugfixes:
- Atomic chess: KNvKN is not insufficient material.
- Crazyhouse: Detect insufficient material. This can not happen unless the game was started with insufficient material.
Changes:
- Better error messages when parsing info from UCI engine fails.
- Better error message for b.set_board_fen(b.fen()).
New features:
- XBoard: Support pondering. Thanks Manik Charan.
- UCI: Support unofficial info ebf.
Bugfixes:
- Implement 16 bit DTZ mapping, which is required for some of the longest 7 piece endgames.
New features:
- XBoard: Support variant. Thanks gbtami.
Bugfixes:
- XBoard: Handle multiple features and features with spaces. Thanks gbtami.
- XBoard: Ignore debug output prefixed with #. Thanks Dan Ravensloft and Manik Charan.
Bugfixes:
- Fix DTZ in case of mate in 1. This is a cosmetic fix, as the previous behavior was only off by one (which is allowed by design).
New features:
- Experimental support for 7 piece Syzygy tablebases.
Changes:
- chess.syzygy.filenames() was renamed to tablenames() and gained an optional piece_count=6 argument.
- chess.syzygy.normalize_filename() was renamed to normalize_tablename().
- The undocumented constructors of chess.syzygy.WdlTable and chess.syzygy.DtzTable have been changed.
Bugfixes:
- In standard chess promoted pieces were incorrectly considered as distinguishable from normal pieces with regard to position equality and threefold repetition. Thanks to kn-sq-tb for reporting.
Changes:
- The PGN game.headers are now a custom mutable mapping that validates the validity of tag names.
- Basic attack and pin methods moved to BaseBoard.
- Documentation fixes and improvements.
New features:
- Added Board.lan() for long algebraic notation.
New features:
- Added Board.mirror(), SquareSet.mirror() and bswap().
- Added chess.pgn.GameNode.accept_subgame().
- XBoard: Added resign, analyze, exit, name, rating, computer, egtpath, pause, resume. Completed option parsing.
Changes:
- chess.pgn: Accept FICS wilds without warning.
- XBoard: Inform engine about game results.
Bugfixes:
- chess.pgn: Allow games without movetext.
- XBoard: Fixed draw handling.
Changes:
- len(board.legal_moves) replaced by board.legal_moves.count(). Previously list(board.legal_moves) was generating moves twice, resulting in a considerable slowdown. Thanks to Martin C. Doege for reporting.
- Dropped Python 2.6 support.
- XBoard: offer_draw renamed to draw.
New features:
- XBoard: Added DrawHandler.
Changes:
- chess.svg is now fully SVG Tiny 1.2 compatible. Removed chess.svg.DEFAULT_STYLE which would from now on be always empty.
Bugfixes:
- Board.set_piece_at() no longer shadows optional promoted argument from BaseBoard.
- Fixed ThreeCheckBoard.is_irreversible() and ThreeCheckBoard._transposition_key().
New features:
- Added Game.without_tag_roster(). chess.pgn.StringExporter() can now handle games without any headers.
- XBoard: white, black, random, nps, otim, undo, remove. Thanks to Manik Charan.
Changes:
- Documentation fixes and tweaks by Boštjan Mejak.
- Changed unicode character for empty squares in Board.unicode().
Release yanked.
Bugfixes:
- Fix arrow positioning on SVG boards.
- Documentation fixes and improvements, making most doctests runnable.
Bugfixes:
- Some XBoard commands were not returning futures.
- Support semicolon comments in PGNs.
Changes:
- Changed FEN and EPD formatting options. It is now possible to include en passant squares in FEN and X-FEN style, or to include only strictly relevant en passant squares.
- Relax en passant square validation in Board.set_fen().
- Ensure is_en_passant(), is_capture(), is_zeroing() and is_irreversible() strictly return bools.
- Accept Z0 as a null move in PGNs.
New features:
- XBoard: Add memory, core, stop and movenow commands. Abstract post/nopost. Initial FeatureMap support. Support usermove.
- Added Board.has_pseudo_legal_en_passant().
- Added Board.piece_map().
- Added SquareSet.carry_rippler().
- Factored out some (unstable) low level APIs: BB_CORNERS, _carry_rippler(), _edges().
New features:
- Experimental XBoard engine support. Thanks to Manik Charan and Cash Costello. Expect breaking changes in future releases.
- Added an undocumented chess.polyglot.ZobristHasher to make Zobrist hashing easier to extend.
Bugfixes:
- Merely pseudo-legal en passant does no longer count for repetitions.
- Fixed repetition detection in Three-Check and Crazyhouse. (Previously check counters and pockets were ignored.)
- Checking moves in Three-Check are now considered as irreversible by ThreeCheckBoard.is_irreversible().
- chess.Move.from_uci("") was raising IndexError instead of ValueError. Thanks Jonny Balls.
Changes:
- chess.syzygy.Tablebases constructor no longer supports directly opening a directory. Use chess.syzygy.open_tablebases().
- chess.gaviota.PythonTablebases and NativeTablebases constructors no longer support directly opening a directory. Use chess.gaviota.open_tablebases().
- chess.Board instances are now compared by the position they represent, not by exact match of the internal data structures (or even move history).
- Relaxed castling right validation in Chess960: Kings/rooks of opposing sites are no longer required to be on the same file.
- Removed misnamed Piece.__unicode__() and BaseBoard.__unicode__(). Use Piece.unicode_symbol() and BaseBoard.unicode() instead.
- Changed chess.SquareSet.__repr__().
- Support [Variant "normal"] in PGNs.
- pip install python-chess[engine] instead of python-chess[uci] (since the extra dependencies are required for both UCI and XBoard engines).
- Mixed documentation fixes and improvements.
Changes:
- Support [Variant "fischerandom"] in PGNs for Cutechess compability. Thanks to Steve Maughan for reporting.
Bugfixes:
- chess.gaviota.NativeTablebases.get_dtm() and get_wdl() were missing.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed castling in atomic chess when there is a rank attack.
- The halfmove clock in Crazyhouse is no longer incremented unconditionally. CrazyhouseBoard.is_zeroing(move) now considers pawn moves and captures as zeroing. Added Board.is_irreversible(move) that can be used instead.
- Fixed an inconsistency where the chess.pgn tokenizer accepts long algebraic notation but Board.parse_san() did not.
Changes:
- Added more NAG constants in chess.pgn.
Bugfixes:
- Crazyhouse drops were accepted as pseudo legal (and legal) even if the respective piece was not in the pocket.
- CrazyhouseBoard.pop() was failing to undo en passant moves.
- CrazyhouseBoard.pop() was always returning None.
- Move.__copy__() was failing to copy Crazyhouse drops.
- Fix ~ order (marker for promoted pieces) in FENs.
- Promoted pieces in Crazyhouse were not communicated with UCI engines.
Changes:
- ThreeCheckBoard.uci_variant changed from threecheck to 3check.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed Board.parse_uci() for crazyhouse drops. Thanks to Ryan Delaney.
- Fixed AtomicBoard.is_insufficient_material().
- Fixed signature of SuicideBoard.was_into_check().
- Explicitly close input and output streams when a chess.uci.PopenProcess terminates.
- The documentation of Board.attackers() was wrongly stating that en passant capturable pawns are considered attacked.
Changes:
- chess.SquareSet is no longer hashable (since it is mutable).
- Removed functions and constants deprecated in v0.17.0.
- Dropped gmpy2 and gmpy as optional dependencies. They were no longer improving performance.
- Various tweaks and optimizations for 5% improvement in PGN parsing and perft speed. (Signature of _is_safe and _ep_skewered changed).
- Rewritten chess.svg.board() using xml.etree. No longer supports pre and post. Use an XML parser if you need to modify the SVG. Now only inserts actually used piece defintions.
- Untangled UCI process and engine instanciation, changing signatures of constructors and allowing arbitrary arguments to subprocess.Popen.
- Coding style and documentation improvements.
New features:
- chess.svg.board() now supports arrows. Thanks to @rheber for implementing this feature.
- Let chess.uci.PopenEngine consistently handle Ctrl+C across platforms and Python versions. chess.uci.popen_engine() now supports a setpgrp keyword argument to start the engine process in a new process group. Thanks to @dubiousjim.
- Added board.king(color) to find the (royal) king of a given side.
- SVGs now have viewBox and chess.svg.board(size=None) supports and defaults to None (i.e. scaling to the size of the container).
Changes:
- Rewritten move generator, various performance tweaks, code simplications (500 lines removed) amounting to doubled PGN parsing and perft speed.
- Removed board.generate_evasions() and board.generate_non_evasions().
- Removed board.transpositions. Transpositions are now counted on demand.
- file_index(), rank_index(), and pop_count() have been renamed to square_file(), square_rank() and popcount() respectively. Aliases will be removed in some future release.
- STATUS_ILLEGAL_CHECK has been renamed to STATUS_RACE_CHECK. The alias will be removed in a future release.
- Removed DIAG_ATTACKS_NE, DIAG_ATTACKS_NW, RANK_ATTACKS and FILE_ATTACKS as well as the corresponding masks. New attack tables BB_DIAG_ATTACKS (combined both diagonal tables), BB_RANK_ATTACKS and BB_FILE_ATTACKS are indexed by square instead of mask.
- board.push() no longer requires pseudo-legality.
- Documentation improvements.
Bugfixes:
- Positions in variant end are now guaranteed to have no legal moves. board.is_variant_end() has been added to test for special variant end conditions. Thanks to salvador-dali.
- chess.svg: Fixed a typo in the class names of black queens. Fixed fill color for black rooks and queens. Added SVG Tiny support. These combined changes fix display in a number of applications, including Jupyter Qt Console. Thanks to Alexander Meshcheryakov.
- board.ep_square was not consistently None instead of 0.
- Detect invalid racing kings positions: STATUS_RACE_OVER, STATUS_RACE_MATERIAL.
- SAN_REGEX, FEN_CASTLING_REGEX and TAG_REGEX now try to match the entire string and no longer accept newlines.
- Fixed Move.__hash__() for drops.
New features:
- board.remove_piece_at() now returns the removed piece.
- Added square_distance() and square_mirror().
- Added msb(), lsb(), scan_reversed() and scan_forward().
- Added BB_RAYS and BB_BETWEEN.
Changes:
- board.move_stack now contains the exact move objects added with Board.push() (instead of normalized copies for castling moves). This ensures they can be used with Board.variation_san() amongst others.
- board.ep_square is now None instead of 0 for no en passant square.
- chess.svg: Better vector graphics for knights. Thanks to ProgramFox.
- Documentation improvements.
Bugfixes:
- Explosions in atomic chess were not destroying castling rights. Thanks to ProgramFOX for finding this issue.
Bugfixes:
- pin_mask(), pin() and is_pinned() make more sense when already in check. Thanks to Ferdinand Mosca.
New features:
- Variant support: Suicide, Giveaway, Atomic, King of the Hill, Racing Kings, Horde, Three-check, Crazyhouse. chess.Move now supports drops.
- More fine grained dependencies. Use pip install python-chess[uci,gaviota] to install dependencies for the full feature set.
- Added chess.STATUS_EMPTY and chess.STATUS_ILLEGAL_CHECK.
- The board.promoted mask keeps track of promoted pieces.
- Optionally copy boards without the move stack: board.copy(stack=False).
- examples/bratko_kopec now supports avoid move (am), variants and displays fractional scores immidiately. Thanks to Daniel Dugovic.
- perft.py rewritten with multi-threading support and moved to examples/perft.
- chess.syzygy.dependencies(), chess.syzygy.all_dependencies() to generate Syzygy tablebase dependencies.
Changes:
- Endgame tablebase probing (Syzygy, Gaviota): probe_wdl() , probe_dtz() and probe_dtm() now raise KeyError or MissingTableError instead of returning None. If you prefer getting None in case of an error use get_wdl(), get_dtz() and get_dtm().
- chess.pgn.BaseVisitor.result() returns True by default and is no longer used by chess.pgn.read_game() if no game was found.
- Non-fast-forward update of the Git repository to reduce size (old binary test assets removed).
- board.pop() now uses a boardstate stack to undo moves.
- uci.engine.position() will send the move history only until the latest zeroing move.
- Optimize board.clean_castling_rights() and micro-optimizations improving PGN parser performance by around 20%.
- Syzygy tables now directly use the endgame name as hash keys.
- Improve test performance (especially on Travis CI).
- Documentation updates and improvements.
New features:
- Highlight last move and checks when rendering board SVGs.
Bugfixes:
- pgn.Game.errors was not populated as documented. Thanks to Ryan Delaney for reporting.
New features:
- Added pgn.GameNode.add_line() and pgn.GameNode.main_line() which make it easier to work with lists of moves as variations.
Bugfixes:
- Fix a bug where shift_right() and shift_2_right() were producing integers larger than 64bit when shifting squares off the board. This is very similar to the bug fixed in v0.15.1. Thanks to piccoloprogrammatore for reporting.
Bugfixes:
- Fix a bug where shift_up_right() and shift_up_left() were producing integers larger than 64bit when shifting squares off the board.
New features:
- Replaced __html__ with experimental SVG rendering for IPython.
Changes:
- chess.uci.Score no longer has upperbound and lowerbound attributes. Previously these were always False.
- Significant improvements of move generation speed, around 2.3x faster PGN parsing. Removed the following internal attributes and methods of the Board class: attacks_valid, attacks_to, attacks_from, _pinned(), attacks_valid_stack, attacks_from_stack, attacks_to_stack, generate_attacks().
- UCI: Do not send isready directly after go. Though allowed by the UCI protocol specification it is just not nescessary and many engines were having trouble with this.
- Polyglot: Use less memory for uniform random choices from big opening books (reservoir sampling).
- Documentation improvements.
Bugfixes:
- Allow underscores in PGN header tags. Found and fixed by Bajusz Tamás.
New features:
- Added Board.chess960_pos() to identify the Chess960 starting position number of positions.
- Added chess.BB_BACKRANKS and chess.BB_PAWN_ATTACKS.
Bugfixes:
- Backport Bugfix for Syzygy DTZ related to en-passant. See official-stockfish/Stockfish@6e2ca97d93812b2.
Changes:
- Added optional argument max_fds=128 to chess.syzygy.open_tablebases(). An LRU cache is used to keep at most max_fds files open. This allows using many tables without running out of file descriptors. Previously all tables were opened at once.
- Syzygy and Gaviota now store absolute tablebase paths, in case you change the working directory of the process.
- The default implementation of chess.uci.InfoHandler.score() will no longer store score bounds in info["score"], only real scores.
- Added Board.set_chess960_pos().
- Documentation improvements.
Changes:
Board.attacker_mask() has been renamed to Board.attackers_mask() for consistency.
The signature of Board.generate_legal_moves() and Board.generate_pseudo_legal_moves() has been changed. Previously it was possible to select piece types for selective move generation:
Board.generate_legal_moves(castling=True, pawns=True, knights=True, bishops=True, rooks=True, queens=True, king=True)
Now it is possible to select arbitrary sets of origin and target squares. to_mask uses the corresponding rook squares for castling moves.
Board.generate_legal_moves(from_mask=BB_ALL, to_mask=BB)
To generate all knight and queen moves do:
board.generate_legal_moves(board.knights | board.queens)
To generate only castling moves use:
Board.generate_castling_moves(from_mask=BB_ALL, to_mask=BB_ALL)
Additional hardening has been added on top of the bugfix from v0.13.3. Diagonal skewers on the last double pawn move are now handled correctly, even though such positions can not be reached with a sequence of legal moves.
chess.syzygy now uses the more efficient selective move generation.
New features:
- The following move generation methods have been added: Board.generate_pseudo_legal_ep(from_mask=BB_ALL, to_mask=BB_ALL), Board.generate_legal_ep(from_mask=BB_ALL, to_mask=BB_ALL), Board.generate_pseudo_legal_captures(from_mask=BB_ALL, to_mask=BB_ALL), Board.generate_legal_captures(from_mask=BB_ALL, to_mask=BB_ALL).
This is a bugfix release for a move generation bug. Other than the bugfix itself there are only minimal fully backwardscompatible changes. You should update immediately.
Bugfixes:
When capturing en passant, both the capturer and the captured pawn disappear from the fourth or fifth rank. If those pawns were covering a horizontal attack on the king, then capturing en passant should not have been legal.
Board.generate_legal_moves() and Board.is_into_check() have been fixed.
The same principle applies for diagonal skewers, but nothing has been done in this release: If the last double pawn move covers a diagonal attack, then the king would have already been in check.
v0.14.0 adds additional hardening for all cases. It is recommended you upgrade to v0.14.0 as soon as you can deal with the non-backwards compatible changes.
Changes:
- chess.uci now uses subprocess32 if applicable (and available). Additionally a lock is used to work around a race condition in Python 2, that can occur when spawning engines from multiple threads at the same time.
- Consistently handle tabs in UCI engine output.
Changes:
- chess.syzygy.open_tablebases() now raises if the given directory does not exist.
- Allow visitors to handle invalid FEN tags in PGNs.
- Gaviota tablebase probing fails faster for piece counts > 5.
Minor new features:
- Added chess.pgn.Game.from_board().
Changes:
- Missing SetUp tags in PGNs are ignored.
- Incompatible comparisons on chess.Piece, chess.Move, chess.Board and chess.SquareSet now return NotImplemented instead of False.
Minor new features:
- Factored out basic board operations to chess.BaseBoard. This is inherited by chess.Board and extended with the usual move generation features.
- Added optional claim_draw argument to chess.Base.is_game_over().
- Added chess.Board.result(claim_draw=False).
- Allow chess.Board.set_piece_at(square, None).
- Added chess.SquareSet.from_square(square).
- chess.pgn.Game.export() and chess.pgn.GameNode.export() have been removed and replaced with a new visitor concept.
- chess.pgn.read_game() no longer takes an error_handler argument. Errors are now logged. Use the new visitor concept to change this behaviour.
Bugfixes:
- Context manager support for pure Python Gaviota probing code. Various documentation fixes for Gaviota probing. Thanks to Jürgen Précour for reporting.
- PGN variation start comments for variations on the very first move were assigned to the game. Thanks to Norbert Räcke for reporting.
Bugfixes:
- Another en passant related Bugfix for pure Python Gaviota tablebase probing.
New features:
- Added pgn.GameNode.is_end().
Changes:
- Big speedup for pgn module. Boards are cached less agressively. Board move stacks are copied faster.
- Added tox.ini to specify test suite and flake8 options.
Bugfixes:
- Some invalid castling rights were silently ignored by Board.set_fen(). Now it is ensured information is stored for retrieval using Board.status().
Bugfixes:
- Some Gaviota probe results were incorrect for positions where black could capture en passant.
Changes:
- Robust handling of invalid castling rights. You can also use the new method Board.clean_castling_rights() to get the subset of strictly valid castling rights.
New features:
- Python 2.6 support. Patch by vdbergh.
- Pure Python Gaviota tablebase probing. Thanks to Jean-Noël Avila.
Bugfixes:
- syzygy.Tablebases.probe_dtz() has was giving wrong results for some positions with possible en passant capturing. This was found and fixed upstream: official-stockfish/Stockfish#394.
- Ignore extra spaces in UCI info lines, as for example sent by the Hakkapeliitta engine. Thanks to Jürgen Précour for reporting.
Changes:
Chess960 support and the representation of castling moves has been changed.
The constructor of board has a new chess960 argument, defaulting to False: Board(fen=STARTING_FEN, chess960=False). That property is available as Board.chess960.
In Chess960 mode the behaviour is as in the previous release. Castling moves are represented as a king move to the corresponding rook square.
In the default standard chess mode castling moves are represented with the standard UCI notation, e.g. e1g1 for king-side castling.
Board.uci(move, chess960=None) creates UCI representations for moves. Unlike Move.uci() it can convert them in the context of the current position.
Board.has_chess960_castling_rights() has been added to test for castling rights that are impossible in standard chess.
The modules chess.polyglot, chess.pgn and chess.uci will transparently handle both modes.
In a previous release Board.fen() has been changed to only display an en passant square if a legal en passant move is indeed possible. This has now also been adapted for Board.shredder_fen() and Board.epd().
New features:
- Get individual FEN components: Board.board_fen(), Board.castling_xfen(), Board.castling_shredder_fen().
- Use Board.has_legal_en_passant() to test if a position has a legal en passant move.
- Make repr(board.legal_moves) human readable.
Bugfixes:
- Fix use-after-free in Gaviota tablebase initialization.
New dependencies:
- If you are using Python < 3.2 you have to install futures in order to use the chess.uci module.
Changes:
There are big changes in the UCI module. Most notably in async mode multiple commands can be executed at the same time (e.g. go infinite and then stop or go ponder and then ponderhit).
go infinite and go ponder will now wait for a result, i.e. you may have to call stop or ponderhit from a different thread or run the commands asynchronously.
stop and ponderhit no longer have a result.
The values of the color constants chess.WHITE and chess.BLACK have been changed. Previously WHITE was 0, BLACK was 1. Now WHITE is True, BLACK is False. The recommended way to invert color is using not color.
The pseudo piece type chess.NONE has been removed in favor of just using None.
Changed the Board(fen) constructor. If the optional fen argument is not given behavior did not change. However if None is passed explicitly an empty board is created. Previously the starting position would have been set up.
Board.fen() will now only show completely legal en passant squares.
Board.set_piece_at() and Board.remove_piece_at() will now clear the move stack, because the old moves may not be valid in the changed position.
Board.parse_uci() and Board.push_uci() will now accept null moves.
Changed shebangs from #!/usr/bin/python to #!/usr/bin/env python for better virtualenv support.
Removed unused game data files from repository.
Bugfixes:
- PGN: Prefer the game result from the game termination marker over * in the header. These should be identical in standard compliant PGNs. Thanks to Skyler Dawson for reporting this.
- Polyglot: minimum_weight for find(), find_all() and choice() was not respected.
- Polyglot: Negative indexing of opening books was raising IndexError.
- Various documentation fixes and improvements.
New features:
Experimental probing of Gaviota tablebases via libgtb.
New methods to construct boards:
>>> chess.Board.empty() Board('8/8/8/8/8/8/8/8 w - - 0 1') >>> board, ops = chess.Board.from_epd("4k3/8/8/8/8/8/8/4K3 b - - fmvn 17; hmvc 13") >>> board Board('4k3/8/8/8/8/8/8/4K3 b - - 13 17') >>> ops {'fmvn': 17, 'hmvc': 13}
Added Board.copy() and hooks to let the copy module to the right thing.
Added Board.has_castling_rights(color), Board.has_kingside_castling_rights(color) and Board.has_queenside_castling_rights(color).
Added Board.clear_stack().
Support common set operations on chess.SquareSet().
Bugfixes:
- UCI module could not handle castling ponder moves. Thanks to Marco Belli for reporting.
- The initial move number in PGNs was missing, if black was to move in the starting position. Thanks to Jürgen Précour for reporting.
- Detect more impossible en passant squares in Board.status(). There already was a requirement for a pawn on the fifth rank. Now the sixth and seventh rank must be empty, additionally. We do not do further retrograde analysis, because these are the only cases affecting move generation.
Bugfixes:
- The initial move number in PGNs was missing, if black was to move in the starting position. Thanks to Jürgen Précour for reporting.
- Detect more impossible en passant squares in Board.status(). There already was a requirement for a pawn on the fifth rank. Now the sixth and seventh rank must be empty, additionally. We do not do further retrograde analysis, because these are the only cases affecting move generation.
This is a big update with quite a few breaking changes. Carefully review the changes before upgrading. It's no problem if you can not update right now. The 0.8.x branch still gets bugfixes.
Incompatible changes:
Removed castling right constants. Castling rights are now represented as a bitmask of the rook square. For example:
>>> board = chess.Board() >>> # Standard castling rights. >>> board.castling_rights == chess.BB_A1 | chess.BB_H1 | chess.BB_A8 | chess.BB_H8 True >>> # Check for the presence of a specific castling right. >>> can_white_castle_queenside = chess.BB_A1 & board.castling_rights
Castling moves were previously encoded as the corresponding king movement in UCI, e.g. e1f1 for white kingside castling. Now castling moves are encoded as a move to the corresponding rook square (UCI_Chess960-style), e.g. e1a1.
You may use the new methods Board.uci(move, chess960=True), Board.parse_uci(uci) and Board.push_uci(uci) to handle this transparently.
The uci module takes care of converting moves when communicating with an engine that is not in UCI_Chess960 mode.
The get_entries_for_position(board) method of polyglot opening book readers has been changed to find_all(board, minimum_weight=1). By default entries with weight 0 are excluded.
The Board.pieces lookup list has been removed.
In 0.8.1 the spelling of repetition (was repitition) was fixed. can_claim_threefold_repetition() and is_fivefold_repetition() are the affected method names. Aliases are now removed.
Board.set_epd() will now interpret bm, am as a list of moves for the current position and pv as a variation (represented by a list of moves). Thanks to Jordan Bray for reporting this.
Removed uci.InfoHandler.pre_bestmove() and uci.InfoHandler.post_bestmove().
uci.InfoHandler().info["score"] is now relative to multipv. Use
>>> with info_handler as info: ... if 1 in info["score"]: ... cp = info["score"][1].cp
where you were previously using
>>> with info_handler as info: ... if "score" in info: ... cp = info["score"].cp
Clear uci.InfoHandler() dictionary at the start of new searches (new on_go()), not at the end of searches.
Renamed PseudoLegalMoveGenerator.bitboard and LegalMoveGenerator.bitboard to PseudoLegalMoveGenerator.board and LegalMoveGenerator.board, respectively.
Scripts removed.
Python 3.2 compability dropped. Use Python 3.3 or higher. Python 2.7 support is not affected.
New features:
- Introduced Chess960 support. Board(fen) and Board.set_fen(fen) now support X-FENs. Added Board.shredder_fen(). Board.status(allow_chess960=True) has an optional argument allowing to insist on standard chess castling rules. Added Board.is_valid(allow_chess960=True).
- Improved move generation using Shatranj-style direct lookup. Removed rotated bitboards. Perft speed has been more than doubled.
- Added choice(board) and weighted_choice(board) for polyglot opening book readers.
- Added Board.attacks(square) to determine attacks from a given square. There already was Board.attackers(color, square) returning attacks to a square.
- Added Board.is_en_passant(move), Board.is_capture(move) and Board.is_castling(move).
- Added Board.pin(color, square) and Board.is_pinned(color, square).
- There is a new method Board.pieces(piece_type, color) to get a set of squares with the specified pieces.
- Do expensive Syzygy table initialization on demand.
- Allow promotions like e8Q (usually e8=Q) in Board.parse_san() and PGN files.
- Patch by Richard C. Gerkin: Added Board.__unicode__() just like Board.__str__() but with unicode pieces.
- Patch by Richard C. Gerkin: Added Board.__html__().
Bugfixes:
- pgn.Game.setup() with the standard starting position was failing when the standard starting position was already set. Thanks to Jordan Bray for reporting this.
Optimizations:
- Remove bswap() from Syzygy decompression hot path. Directly read integers with the correct endianness.
- Fixed pondering mode in uci module. For example ponderhit() was blocking indefinitely. Thanks to Valeriy Huz for reporting this.
- Patch by Richard C. Gerkin: Moved searchmoves to the end of the UCI go command, where it will not cause other command parameters to be ignored.
- Added missing check or checkmate suffix to castling SANs, e.g. O-O-O#.
- Fixed off-by-one error in polyglot opening book binary search. This would not have caused problems for real opening books.
- Fixed Python 3 support for reverse polyglot opening book iteration.
- Bestmoves may be literally (none) in UCI protocol, for example in checkmate positions. Fix parser and return None as the bestmove in this case.
- Fixed spelling of repetition (was repitition). can_claim_threefold_repetition() and is_fivefold_repetition() are the affected method names. Aliases are there for now, but will be removed in the next release. Thanks to Jimmy Patrick for reporting this.
- Added SquareSet.__reversed__().
- Use containerized tests on Travis CI, test against Stockfish 6, improved test coverage amd various minor clean-ups.
- Implement Syzygy endgame tablebase probing. https://syzygy-tables.info is an example project that provides a public API using the new features.
- The interface for aynchronous UCI command has changed to mimic concurrent.futures. is_done() is now just done(). Callbacks will receive the command object as a single argument instead of the result. The result property and wait() have been removed in favor of a synchronously waiting result() method.
- The result of the stop and go UCI commands are now named tuples (instead of just normal tuples).
- Add alias Board for Bitboard.
- Fixed race condition during UCI engine startup. Lines received during engine startup sometimes needed to be processed before the Engine object was fully initialized.
- Implement UCI engine communication.
- Patch by Matthew Lai: Add caching for gameNode.board().
- If there are comments in a game before the first move, these are now assigned to Game.comment instead of Game.starting_comment. Game.starting_comment is ignored from now on. Game.starts_variation() is no longer true. The first child node of a game can no longer have a starting comment. It is possible to have a game with Game.comment set, that is otherwise completely empty.
- Fix export of games with variations. Previously the moves were exported in an unusual (i.e. wrong) order.
- Install gmpy2 or gmpy if you want to use slightly faster binary operations.
- Ignore superfluous variation opening brackets in PGN files.
- Add GameNode.san().
- Remove sparse_pop_count(). Just use pop_count().
- Remove next_bit(). Now use bit_scan().
PGN parsing is now more robust: read_game() ignores invalid tokens. Still exceptions are going to be thrown on illegal or ambiguous moves, but this behaviour can be changed by passing an error_handler argument.
>>> # Raises ValueError: >>> game = chess.pgn.read_game(file_with_illegal_moves)
>>> # Silently ignores errors and continues parsing: >>> game = chess.pgn.read_game(file_with_illegal_moves, None)
>>> # Logs the error, continues parsing: >>> game = chess.pgn.read_game(file_with_illegal_moves, logger.exception)
If there are too many closing brackets this is now ignored.
Castling moves like 0-0 (with zeros) are now accepted in PGNs. The Bitboard.parse_san() method remains strict as always, though.
Previously the parser was strictly following the PGN spefification in that empty lines terminate a game. So a game like
[Event "?"] { Starting comment block } 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nf6 *would have ended directly after the starting comment. To avoid this, the parser will now look ahead until it finds at least one move or a termination marker like *, 1-0, 1/2-1/2 or 0-1.
Introduce a new function scan_headers() to quickly scan a PGN file for headers without having to parse the full games.
Minor testcoverage improvements.
- Fix bug where pawn_moves_from() and consequently is_legal() weren't handling en passant correctly. Thanks to Norbert Naskov for reporting.
- Fix is_fivefold_repitition(): The new fivefold repetition rule requires the repetitions to occur on alternating consecutive moves.
- Minor testing related improvements: Close PGN files, allow running via setuptools.
- Add recently introduced features to README.
- Introduce can_claim_draw(), can_claim_fifty_moves() and can_claim_threefold_repitition().
- Since the first of July 2014 a game is also over (even without claim by one of the players) if there were 75 moves without a pawn move or capture or a fivefold repetition. Let is_game_over() respect that. Introduce is_seventyfive_moves() and is_fivefold_repitition(). Other means of ending a game take precedence.
- Threefold repetition checking requires efficient hashing of positions to build the table. So performance improvements were needed there. The default polyglot compatible zobrist hashes are now built incrementally.
- Fix low level rotation operations l90(), l45() and r45(). There was no problem in core because correct versions of the functions were inlined.
- Fix equality and inequality operators for Bitboard, Move and Piece. Also make them robust against comparisons with incompatible types.
- Provide equality and inequality operators for SquareSet and polyglot.Entry.
- Fix return values of incremental arithmetical operations for SquareSet.
- Make polyglot.Entry a collections.namedtuple.
- Determine and improve test coverage.
- Minor coding style fixes.
- Bitboard.status() now correctly detects STATUS_INVALID_EP_SQUARE, instead of errors or false reports.
- Polyglot opening book reader now correctly handles knight underpromotions.
- Minor coding style fixes, including removal of unused imports.
Rename property half_moves of Bitboard to halfmove_clock.
Rename property ply of Bitboard to fullmove_number.
Let PGN parser handle symbols like !, ?, !? and so on by converting them to NAGs.
Add a human readable string representation for Bitboards.
>>> print(chess.Bitboard()) r n b q k b n r p p p p p p p p . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . P P P P P P P P R N B Q K B N R
Various documentation improvements.
- Implement PGN parsing and writing.
- Hugely improve test coverage and use Travis CI for continuous integration and testing.
- Create an API documentation.
- Improve Polyglot opening-book handling.
Apply the lessons learned from the previous releases, redesign the API and implement it in pure Python.
Implement the basics in C++ and provide bindings for Python. Obviously performance was a lot better - but at the expense of having to compile code for the target platform.
First experiments with a way too slow pure Python API, creating way too many objects for basic operations.