Chess variant stats

This project generates statistics for chess variants using Fairy-Stockfish and its python binding pyffish.

Process

Generating statistics consists of the following steps:

1. generate_games.py to generate a set of positions in FEN/EPD format from playing engine games. Alternatively positions can be extracted from other sources such from PGNs with pgn2epd.py.
2. game_stats.py to report basic game statistics, such as result distribution, game length, and branching factor.
3. piece_values.py to fit piece values on the generated data using logistic regression.
4. evaluate_endgame.py to identify endgames occuring in the generated positions and collect their result statistics, including insufficient and sufficient mating material.

Steps 2 to 4 are independent of each other, but they can be run on the same input data to save resources on generation.

Setup

The scripts require at least python3.2 as well as the dependencies from the requirements.txt. Install them using

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Usage

A simple example of running the scripts is:

python3 generate_games.py --engine fairy-stockfish.exe --variant chess --book chess.epd --movetime 10 --count 1000 > test.epd
python3 game_stats.py --branching-factor test.epd
python3 piece_values.py test.epd
python3 evaluate_endgames.py --max-pieces=4 test.epd

Run the scripts with --help to get help on the supported parameters.

For reliable results you usually need to generate at least 100k positions, or more depending on the number of pieces, imbalances, and game phases. As starting positions for the data generation (--book) you can either use pregenerated opening books or use the book generator yourself.