AggroChess v1.0.0 ⚔️

Welcome to the initial release of AggroChess, a tactical, highly aggressive chess engine written in Rust. Unlike traditional engines that play dry, slow-grinding positional chess, AggroChess is specifically tuned to mimic the active, sacrifice-heavy playstyle of World Champion Mikhail Tal.

This release contains the precompiled standalone executable binary aggro_chess.exe.

Key Features in this Release:

• Mikhail Tal-Style Aggression Heuristics: Includes speculative sacrifice discounts (reducing material deficit calculations by up to 45% during attacks) and king ring virtual mobility escape restrictions (+150 cp cramp bonuses).
• Attack Coordination Heuristic: Awards a positional bonus of +25 cp for each square in the opponent's king ring targeted by $\ge 2$ coordinating friendly pieces.
• Built-in Opening Gambit Book: Hardcoded prefix-path-matching for sharp openings, including the Evans Gambit, King's Gambit, Smith-Morra Gambit, Danish Gambit, Albin Countergambit, Stafford Gambit, and Budapest Gambit (operating via Zobrist hashes even if no external opening book is loaded).
• King Safety Balance: Center-king open-file penalties and castling-wing bonuses encourage early castling under quiet positions, while allowing the king to lead the assault from the center in dominant attacks.
• Optimized Search Engine: Principal Variation Search (PVS), Aspiration Windows, killer/history move ordering, and Static Exchange Evaluation (SEE) capture pruning. Runs at 1.4+ Million Nodes Per Second (NPS).

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Installation & Setup Instructions

Since this release only includes the precompiled standalone executable, follow these steps to play against it:

1. Download the Binary: Download the aggro_chess.exe file attached to this release.
2. Load in a Chess GUI:
   • Arena Chess GUI: Go to Engines -> New Engine -> Select UCI -> Browse and select the downloaded aggro_chess.exe.
   • Cute Chess / Lichess / ChessBase: Add the engine as a standard UCI engine pointing to the path of aggro_chess.exe.
3. Opening Book Setup (Optional):
   • By default, the engine searches for ph-gambitbook.bin in the folder it is executed from to supplement non-gambit openings.
   • To play strictly the built-in curated gambits, configure the engine option BookPath to a non-existent file (e.g. none.bin).
4. TT Hash Customization: Adjust the Hash option in your GUI to change search memory size in Megabytes (defaults to 16MB).