CheckMate Machine ♟️

IEEE-VIT's Chess Playground. Includes a Chess Engine and some support tools for using it.

Overview

CheckMate Machine is a compact toolkit created by IEEE-VIT that combines:

• A lightweight search-based chess engine,
• A demo 2D web UI for playing against the engine,
• A lightweight FastAPI backend that exposes the engine as an HTTP service,
• Vision & preprocessing helpers to take and convert board screenshots into FEN strings.

Project Structure

• 2DChessBoard: vision / preprocessing pipeline used to convert 2D screenshots into chessboard FEN input.
• Chess Engine: the engine implementation (board, move generation, minimax search)
• Demo/Frontend/: simple static demo (HTML, CSS and JS) that renders a board and can play single-player vs the engine.
• Demo/Backend/: backend FastAPI service that exposes /engine/best_move.

Quick Start

Get the demo running locally in two terminals: backend (engine API) and frontend (static site).

1. Create & activate a Python virtual environment (Optional, but recommended)

python -m venv .venv
# Windows
.\\.venv\\Scripts\\activate
# macOS / Linux
source .venv/bin/activate

2. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Run the backend (FastAPI + engine)

uvicorn Demo.Backend.main:app --reload --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000

4. Serve the frontend (static)

# from repo root
python -m http.server 3000 --directory Demo/Frontend
# open http://localhost:3000 in your browser

Using the Engine API

The backend exposes a single useful endpoint for the demo UI:

• POST /engine/best_move — request the engine's recommended move.

Request JSON body example:

{
	"fen": "rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w - - 0 1",
	"side": "white",
	"depth": 2
}

Example curl test (from a terminal):

curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8000/engine/best_move \\
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \\
	-d '{"fen":"rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w - - 0 1","depth":2}'

Response format (JSON):

{
	"from": "e2",
	"to": "e4",
	"stats": { "nodes_evaluated": 123, "depth": 2 }
}