Provide API for using UCI chess engines

[lawlesscreation]

Hi,

I'm wondering if node-chess can be used to carry out board/game analysis, similar to Stockfish JS, where you could give a fen string or board position and node-chess analyses and scores the board in favour of white or black. Similar to http://forwardcoding.com/projects/ajaxchess/chess.html.

It looks like node-chess has a configurable analysis engine with depth and time options but I cannot see any documentation or examples of how this analysis messaging can be displayed to the user.

Thanks for any help.

[Seikho]

I've basically decided that an analysis engine for this would be too difficult at the moment.
However it wouldn't be too laborious to provide an API for attaching a UCI engine. Something like:

import * as stockfish from "stockfish";
const game = chess.classic.engine();
const analyzer = new stockfish();
game.analyzer(analyzer.postMessage);

analyzer.onmessage = event => { /* stuff ... */ }

game.analyze({ /* options ... */ });

If you're happy with that, I can work on that this week.

[lawlesscreation]

Thanks for the response Seikho. That could be a neat feature but we were looking for something that had the analysis engine already. Sadly Stockfish (and therefore Stockfish JS) is GPL licensed which means we cannot use it this time :(

[Seikho]

No problem. I used stockfish as an example. The API would take any UCI chess engine.

[lawlesscreation]

You wouldn't happen to know of any UCI chess engines written in JavaScript or emscripten port? We've not been able to find any other than Stockfish JS.

[Seikho]

The engine you linked should be using UCI. Does that have a compatible license?

[Seikho]

Are you able to use GPLv3?

[lawlesscreation]

Garbochess-JS has a BSD license which is great but it doesn't look like it has changed since 2012 and had limited documentation.

Sadly we cannot using GPLv3 because we cannot open-source our code, at least in the short-term.

[Seikho]

The documentation definitely is poor, but seems to have the same API as stockfish. Apparently it has a playing strength of ~2600 ELO as well.

[lawlesscreation]

Thanks for you're help Seikho. I think we'll give that a shot until we can open-source our code and use Stockfish :)