New engine releases 2026 H2

[voffka]

Hi there,

I’d like to introduce a new open-source chess engine called Pastèque: https://github.com/vshcherbyna/pasteque

I originally started working on Pastèque in 2018. Development stopped later that year when I shifted most of my attention to Igel.

Recently, while looking through an old hard drive, I found some uncommitted Pastèque source code. That gave me enough motivation to clean things up a little and finally make the project public rather than leave it sitting on a disk.

The first release is Pastèque 0.0.0 - binaries for windows are here.

At this stage, the evaluation function is initialized with random weights, so the engine does not play good chess yet. The search is functional, though, and the engine is already capable of playing complete games.

For now, this release is mostly about publishing and preserving the work that was done back in 2018. I may continue developing it further, depending on time and motivation.

In case of any questions/suggestions please ask them in the main Pastèque thread at viewtopic.php?p=997657#p997657