Contributing

Overview

If you would like to contribute to this project, there are multiple ways to do so, with or without knowledge about programming. Any contribution is welcome:

• code
  • playing strength improvements
  • comments/documentation
  • features, see the feature requests for some ideas
  • bugfixes, see the bug list
  • refactorings/cleanups
  • merging upstream changes (from https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish)
• training variant NNUE evaluation, also see https://github.com/fairy-stockfish/Fairy-Stockfish/wiki/NNUE
• contribute to related projects, see https://github.com/fairy-stockfish/Fairy-Stockfish/wiki/Related-projects
• documentation
  • improve/extend wiki
  • add relevant translations to wiki (e.g., Korean, Thai, Chinese, Japanese), or reduce language barriers by other means such as comments, posts, videos, or the like, in the respective language
• testing
  • strength compared to other engines and human players
  • compatibility with GUIs
  • weaknesses in game-play
• ideas
  • feature suggestions
  • potential playing strength improvements
• donating CPU time
  • running workers (local machine or cloud instances) for multi-variant fishtest, see https://github.com/ianfab/fishtest/wiki, that is used to test playing strength improvements of the engine and to run regression tests.
• donating via patreon or paypal

Getting started

If you want to contribute code, reading the introduction to the code base can help you get started. However, you can also focus on specific parts of the code, e.g., the evaluation, without necessarily needing to be familiar large parts of the code base to be able to contribute. When starting to contribute playing strength improvements, it usually makes sense to focus on the search and evaluation code (mainly search.cpp and evaluate.cpp) first. Once you have an idea for an improvement, you can submit your first test to variant fishtest.