About Kreveta

An open-source UCI-compliant chess engine written entirely in C#. Designed to be fast, strong and reliable, while still aiming for readability, code clarity and proper documentation, making it ideal for others to study, experiment with, or use as a foundation for new engines.

Kreveta is a long-term hobby project, which I've been working on for a few years now, with each engine being derived from the previous one. The development of the current version started on March 3, 2025, and is now being used as the basis for my SOČ thesis.

Contributions

So far, I am almost the only contributor to the engine and the author of this website. However, any contributions, bug reports, and feature ideas are always welcome. If you'd like to help, open an issue or pull request on Github, or star the project to support its development.

License

Kreveta is released under the MIT License, meaning it's free to use, modify, and distribute.

Tests

Each version is tested against its predecessor, using Cutechess-cli.

Older tests utilized a custom, equal opening book. However, this book comprised a very limited number of unique opening lines, making rating precision not scale well with larger tests. For this reason, since version 2.2.5, the opening book UHO_4060_v4.epd at depth = 16 is used, featuring some highly unbalanced positions. All openings are played in pairs, ensuring random noise is minimal, though ratings may now be squashed due to strongly biased positions being present.

No draw adjudications are used, and resign adjudications are set to reasonable evaluation thresholds not to stop games prematurely (usually, a winning score of at least 500 cp is required).

no tests carried out yet
          

no tests carried out yet
        

Elo   | 72.8 +/- 8.4
Games | total: 5000, W: 2391, L: 1358, D: 1251
Score | 0.603, LOS: 100.0 %, draw ratio: 25.0 %
          

Elo   | 30.6 +/- 8.0
Games | total: 5000, W: 1928, L: 1489, D: 1583
Score | 0.544, LOS: 100.0 %, draw ratio: 31.7 %
        

Elo   | 24.0 +/- 10.9
Games | total: 3000, W: 1249, L: 1042, D: 709
Score | 0.534, LOS: 100.0 %, draw ratio: 23.6 %
          

Elo   | 26.6 +/- 10.4
Games | total: 3000, W: 1154, L: 925, D: 921
Score | 0.538, LOS: 100.0 %, draw ratio: 30.7 %
        

This release seems to be slightly regressing. No large-scale tests have been conducted.
          

Elo   | 19.3 +/- 12.9
Games | total: 2000, W: 769, L: 658, D: 573
Score | 0.528, LOS: 99.8 %, draw ratio: 28.6 %
          

Elo   | 22.3 +/- 13.5
Games | total: 1500, W: 491, L: 395, D: 614
Score | 0.532, LOS: 99.9 %, draw ratio: 40.9 %
        

Elo   | 112.1 +/- 20.6
Games | total: 1000, W: 579, L: 267, D: 154
Score | 0.656, LOS: 100.0 %, draw ratio: 15.4 %
          

Elo   | 116.8 +/- 19.8
Games | total: 1000, W: 553, L: 229, D: 218
Score | 0.662, LOS: 100.0 %, draw ratio: 21.8 %
        

Elo   | 58.9 +/- 16.1
Games | total: 1500, W: 745, L: 493, D: 262
Score | 0.584, LOS: 100.0 %, draw ratio: 17.5 %