Hello there !
My name is Olivier from France. Around 2008 I started a project based on a kid's dream: create an artificial intelligence able to play chess. I started in C# to give it a try, and then moved it to a multiplatform C/C++ project.
As of now the engine is 100% UCI compatible and also understands basic xboard commands. The level of the engine is currently almoooost ok for chess beginners, know every level moves, and follows the academic alpha-beta search algorithms.
But as you can guess many features are missing or need to be improved: selective search, ponder mode, transposition tables, advance xboard syntax, opening/endgame libs etc.
The project hosted by source forge can be found here
https://sourceforge.net/projects/olivechess/
In fact right now everything works quite well and I even integrated some testing and stat features into the engine. But I am still struggling with/against transposition tables and move ordering as they can provide a HUGE speedup in alphabeta search. I could also have a better move pruning. Anyway I think I missed something because the engine doesn't go more than depth 8 for average positions, and it could be much better.
If anyone can help me on that he/she would become a lifesaver to me.
The project is also widely opened for newcomers seeking for engine optimisation, C++
See you soon!