[ANN] Golem - Yet another open source, C-based chess engine

[p1x3r]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to introduce a project I’ve been working on called Golem. It is a UCI-compatible chess engine written in C, developed primarily for learning purposes.

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/P1X3R/golem

My goal with Golem was to build a capable engine from the ground up without external libraries, focusing purely on move-generation logic and search efficiency.

Performance & Technical Notes: The engine is currently UCI-compliant and supports all standard rules (Castling, En Passant, 50-move rule, etc.). Here are some performance benchmarks from my local machine:

• Perft (with incremental eval): ~15M NPS
• Perft (no incremental eval): ~20M NPS
• Search: ~4.4M NPS
• Hardware: Intel Pentium Silver N5030 @ 1.10GHz, 4GB RAM

Strength & Testing: While I don't have a formal Elo estimate yet, I suspect it plays around the 2000 Elo range based on initial tests. I would be very grateful if anyone with a testing environment could run a few games against similar engines and share the results or a PGN.

I am also open to any feedback on the source code or suggestions for search optimizations.

Thanks!

[Graham Banks]

There is already a chess engine by that name:

https://www.chessprogramming.org/Golem

[p1x3r]

Oh no

[p1x3r]

Thanks for pointing that out, Graham — I wasn’t aware of the existing engine with the same name.

To avoid confusion, I’ve renamed the project to Zugblitz.

Updated GitHub repository: https://github.com/P1X3R/zugblitz

The engine itself (UCI name, binary, README) has also been renamed accordingly.

Apologies for the oversight, and thanks again for the heads-up.