arianahejazyan/Athena

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Getting Started
• Commands
• Features
• 4PC Engines
• Acknowledgements

Introduction

coming soon

Getting Started

To build Athena from source, run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/arianahejazyan/Athena.git
cd Athena
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build

Launch the interactive CLI with:

./build/src/athena

Athena's move generator is highly optimized, achieving approximately 120 Mnps (million nodes per second) in benchmarks. You can verify this yourself:

./build/tests/perft_bench --benchmark_counters_tabular=true

Commands

Athena is a UCI-compatible chess engine and supports all standard UCI commands.

UCI Commands

Command	Description
uci	Identifies the engine and returns its name, version, and supported options.
isready	Checks if the engine is ready; responds with readyok when synchronized.
setoption	Sets a configuration option (e.g. Hash, Threads).
ucinewgame	Notifies the engine that a new game is about to begin.
position	Sets the board position, optionally followed by a sequence of moves.
go	Starts the search on the current position.
stop	Stops the current search as soon as possible.
quit	Shuts down the engine.

UCI Options

Name	Default	Description
Setup	modern	Board setup variant to use (modern or classic).

Debug Commands

Athena also provides additional commands for testing and debugging:

Command	Description
perft	Runs a perft (performance test) to count legal moves at a given depth.
print	Displays the current board position in the console.

Features

Chess

• UCI protocol
• 256-bit bitboard board representation
• Optimized legal move generator (~120 Mnps)

Search

• Negamax
• Alpha-Beta pruning
• Iterative deepening

Evaluate

• Material counting

4PC Engines

This is a list of active four-player chess (4PC) engines. Feel free to add your own engine here or ask me to include it. You can also find a list of four-player chess tools in the Colosseum.

Engine	GitHub	Chess.com
Athena	arianahejazyan/Athena	TeamAthena
Samaritan	Moxile/Samaritan	—
Enigma	anurag-baundwal/4pchess	TeamEnigma
Nexus	(private)	TeamNexus
BlackKnight	(private)	TeamBlackKnight
Titan	obryanlouis/4pchess	TeamTitan
Terminator	(private)	TeamTerminator

• Chess-Melee

Acknowledgements

• Special thanks to Moxile for always supporting me and for the many hours of programming together.
• Special thanks to tsoj, Lotfy and the Discord chess engine community for their help with coding and discussions.
• Special thanks to qilp and Chess.com team for providing API access and support.
• Special thanks to all contributors for their support and contributions.