Oxide

A UCI chess engine written in Rust.

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🔎 About

Oxide is a UCI-compliant chess engine built from scratch in Rust, focused on clean code and simplicity. It uses bitboard representation, obstruction difference move generation for sliding pieces, and NNUE evaluation with a network trained on Leela Chess Zero data using the bullet trainer.

The engine runs a single-threaded alpha-beta search with various enhancements, and is playable on Lichess or through any UCI-compatible GUI such as CuteChess.

🏗️ Building from Source

Prerequisites

• Rust (stable toolchain)

Compile

git clone https://github.com/Miguevrgo/Oxide.git
cd Oxide
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo build --release

The binary will be at ./target/release/oxide.

Run

Start the engine in UCI mode:

./target/release/oxide

Bench

Run a fixed-depth search over 50 positions to measure nodes/second:

./target/release/oxide bench

Perft Test Suite

Run the full perft correctness suite (20 positions with known node counts):

RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo test --release -- --nocapture

You can also run perft interactively through UCI by typing perft <depth> after launching the engine.

📦 Releases

Pre-built binaries are available on the Releases page for different CPU targets. If you're unsure which to pick, download the one matching your architecture — or build from source with target-cpu=native for best performance on your machine.

🙏 Acknowledgements

Oxide draws heavily from the Chess Programming Wiki and from studying other engines, in particular:

• Akimbo — especially for the NNUE implementation
• Carp
• Berserk