Hi all,

I found that there was no pure representation of Chess written in Erlang/OTP.

So, now I would like to announce my implementation… Binbo.

It’s available on Github:

Binbo is a Chess representation written in pure Erlang using Bitboards. It is basically aimed to be used on game servers where people play chess online.

It’s called Binbo because its ground is a binary board containing only zeros and ones (0 and 1) since this is the main meaning of Bitboards as an internal chessboard representation.

Binbo also uses the Magic Bitboards approach for a blazing fast move generation of sliding pieces (rook, bishop, and queen).

Note: it’s not a chess engine but it could be a good starting point for it. It can play the role of a core (regarding move generation and validation) for multiple chess engines running on distributed Erlang nodes, since Binbo is an OTP application itself.

Features:

• Blazing fast move generation and validation.
• No bottlenecks. Every game is an Erlang process (gen_server) with its own game state.
• Ability to create as many concurrent games as many Erlang processes allowed in VM.
• Unicode chess symbols support for the board visualization right in Erlang shell.
• Ready for use on game servers.

Links.
Bitboards:
https://www.chessprogramming.org/Bitboards

Magic Bitboards:
https://www.chessprogramming.org/Magic_Bitboards