Build your own chess-bot to compete against other teams and win the Grandmaster title!

The Challenge

Think you’ve got what it takes to build a chess-bot that can outplay the competition? 

The ChessBot Hackathon is your chance to put your coding skills to the test! Writing a chess-bot is a challenging, fun, and educational experience. From optimization and testing to algorithms and debugging, there is a lot to learn and do.

In this hackathon, you'll build a chess-bot that is capable of playing standard chess, and at the end, have them compete against each other.

The Challenge

Leagues 

You might have already built many chess-bots, or this might be your first try. To keep things fair, this hackathon has two leagues:

• Minor League:
  Recommended for people building their first chess-bot. You'll "only" have to program the evaluation function, which determines which moves are the best.
• Major League:
  Recommended for people who have experience with programming chess bots, and/or are in for a challenge. You'll have to write everything from scratch(*).
  *There are some libraries (like standard libraries, libraries for parsing FENs, etc.) and boilerplate code that you'll be allowed to use, please see the GitHub page for more info.
  

Rules of the Game

Team compositions:

• Minor league: up to 3 Codam students
• Major league: up to 2 Codam students and/or alumni

All code will have to be written during the event.

All code must be written by your team and your team only. This means no generative AI or asking a "friend" to write the code for you.

No using already existing chess-bot.

Except for those explicitly allowed, the usage of libraries is forbidden. The list of allowed libraries will be provided on the Monday of the hackathon.

The Organizers

This hackathon is a student lead activity.
If you have any questions about it, please ping the following students on Slack:

• Daan Meijer (dmeijer)
• Abdoulaye Ba (abba)