Moonbird

Ataxx engine written in Nim

Moonbird is a superhuman Ataxx engine. It supports the Universal Ataxx Interface (UAI), so it can be used with any Ataxx tools or GUIs that support this protocol, such as AtaxxGUI or Cuteataxx. Moonbird is written in the programming language Nim, a modern compiled systems language.

Moonbird uses the alpha-beta search algorithm with modifications such as move ordering, transposition table, nullmove pruning, principal variation search, late move and futility reductions, and aspiration windows. The evaluation function uses large tables of 4x2 and 2x4 tuples that are tuned using stochastic gradient descent.

Prerequisites

You need Nim 2.0 or newer. You also need the threadpool library malebolgia:

nimble install malebolgia@1.3.2

Compiling for native CPU

nim native Moonbird

Compiling for generic CPUs

nim default Moonbird

Run training data generation

nimble install malebolgia@1.3.2
# Arguments are: sampleGameSearchNodes targetTrainingSamples useOnlyHalfCPU
nim genData --run Moonbird 6_000 50_000_000 false

Run SPRT

nim sprt --run Moonbird

Tune eval parameters

nim tuneEvalParams --run Moonbird

Tune search parameters

nim runWeatherFactory --run Moonbird

Run tests

./run_tests.sh