Nilatac

A suicide chess engine with UCI support

Quick links

• Online opening book
• About page
• Nilatac's Lichess profile (see also its weakened sibling, CatNail)

Status

Nilatac is not under active development. I have moved the code here because GitHub is more popular than Subversion, but I haven't worked on the code for many years (except for occasional flurries of book research).

If you have questions or contributions, please contact me - I still have a general interest in suicide chess.

Installation instructions (GNU/Linux)

• Get the code from this page.
• Optionally, get the end-game table files. Unpack the archive into the egtb/ subdirectory. There already exists an egtb symlink as a memento, but feel free to change that.
• Choose a make target (read the Makefile for details).
• Run make <target>.

Single-player mode

Nilatac has basic UCI support, so it should work (or almost work...) with any variant-aware GUI. I have tested it with cutechess. If you would like to see better support for your favorite GUI, please let me know and I can work on it.

Book browser

You can load Nilatac's book in memory and use your web browser to query it:

• Run ./nilatac-pn webserver. It'll take a few seconds to load the book and open a local port.
• Point your browser to /path/to/nilatac/book.php.

Command-line browser

You probably won't need this, but it's there. It allows you to expand leaf nodes, collapse (delete all children of) analyzed nodes, mark nodes as won/drawn/lost and more.

• Run ./nilatac-pn browse
  • This also opens port 5000 as in the previous section.
• There is no documentation here, sorry. Please read the function browse_pns_tree() in pns.cc for a list of commands.

Book research

If you'd like to let Nilatac investigate some openings, run something like:

./nilatac-pn --save_every=100 analyze --movelist="c3 e6 Na3"

You can stop the research at any time with Ctrl-C, but you will lose unsaved progress (hence the flag --save-every).