philidor
a chess bot that plays for draws rather than wins or losses
details
Aug 2026 – present
- building a chess agent that plays for draws, selecting moves by highest draw probability from engine win-draw-loss evaluation
- wrote a threaded UCI engine wrapper with timeout handling, and a board subclass with incremental Zobrist hashing for fast repetition detection, covered by unit tests
- training a network on Lichess games with a reward function ranking draws above wins, as a research project