Free Javascript chess engines and notation board presenters

I had to find a free Javascript based chess engine for one of my projects. I must admit, that I’m a low-level player and much, much lower level chess developer, so I assumed, that there is no chance, you can write such advanced thing like complete chess engine in such simple language like Javascript.

Turned out, I was wrong. I was actually devatated (again and again) with the power and possibilities behind Javascript.

I found three interesting (promising) full chess engines and two PGN/FEN notation board presenters. All free, all easy to implement into own project and all purely in Javascript:

  1. HTML5 Chess. Complete engine along with 2D/3D view modes. A strong algorithm.
  2. p4wn javascript chess. A concise javascript chess engine, first time written for the 5k web competition. It plays at the level of a lazy amateur, so is a good match for most opponents.
  3. JavaScript-Chess-AI. Third full chess engine, that I found. Downloaded and tried to test it, but I wasn’t able to run it in newest version of Chrome — empty board appeared and clicking New Game brought no effect.
  4. pgn4web. Javascript chess games viewer for websites, blogs and live broadcasts.
  5. jChess. A jQuery-based library for parsing and displaying chess games. Currently takes FEN and PGN as inputs.

If you think about the last one then note that there are some pull request waiting… long for merging.

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