
Chess Engine for the AI Era
NIKOLA is a supercomputer-class chess engine built for modern data-center GPUs—from A100 through Blackwell B300. Written entirely in Mind Language, it uses Mind IR for NNUE evaluation and distributed endgame intelligence—without Python, without Rust, without dependencies.
Core Technology
Built on cutting-edge GPU architectures and advanced AI algorithms
Artificial Intelligence
Numerical Analytics
Blackwell Architecture
Dynamic Parallelism
Built with Mind Language
NIKOLA is written entirely in Mind, a systems programming language designed for high-performance computing with first-class support for parallelism and hardware optimization. Mind compiles to native code that rivals hand-tuned assembly while providing safe, expressive abstractions.
Mind IR
Mind Intermediate Representation provides a low-level abstraction that maps directly to hardware, enabling optimal code generation for CPUs and GPUs. The IR supports SSA form, explicit memory management, and hardware-specific intrinsics for maximum control.
Mind Intrinsics Compiler
MIC compiles Mind code to native machine instructions with full support for AVX-512, AVX-VNNI, and AMX on Intel/AMD processors, plus SM100 PTX for NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. The compiler performs aggressive optimizations while preserving programmer intent.
Mind Array Processing
MAP enables efficient array operations with automatic parallelization across CPU cores and GPU streaming multiprocessors. Perfect for batch position evaluation and neural network inference, MAP handles memory layout optimization and kernel fusion automatically.
Key Features
Everything you need for world-class chess computation
NNUE Evaluation
HalfKAv2 neural network architecture trained on over 100 million positions from Lichess master games. Features incremental accumulator updates. Supports AVX-512, AVX-VNNI, and AMX on CPU, plus CUDA 12.x with FP8/INT8 tensor cores for GPU acceleration.
Opening Book
Comprehensive opening book with over 100 million positions extracted from master-level games, stored in mmap-friendly Polyglot format. Includes weighted move selection based on win rates and supports multiple repertoires.
GPU Acceleration
Native support for NVIDIA data-center GPUs from A100 through Blackwell (B200/B300) architectures via Mind MAP. Leverages FP8 tensor cores for blazing-fast neural network inference.
Search Algorithm
State-of-the-art alpha-beta pruning with principal variation search (PVS), null move pruning, late move reductions (LMR), transposition tables with Zobrist hashing, killer moves, history heuristics, aspiration windows, and iterative deepening with pondering.
UCI Protocol
Full UCI (Universal Chess Interface) protocol support for seamless integration with popular chess GUIs including Arena, ChessBase, CuteChess, and Fritz. Also supports Lichess Bot API for automated online play.
Data Service
Connects to dedicated chess data servers via HTTP for opening book queries, NNUE position cache lookups, and Syzygy tablebase probing. Supports local caching and fallback modes for offline operation.
Technology Stack
NVIDIA CUDA
- RDMA for GPUDirect
- NVLink 5.0
- CUDA cuBLAS
- Dynamic Parallelism
- Triton Inference Server
- cuDNN 9.x
- Mind IR Compiler
- MIC Intrinsics
- MAP Array Processing
- SM100 PTX Backend
- AVX-512/AMX Support
- OpenCL 3.0
Chess Engine
- NNUE HalfKAv2
- Polyglot Opening Book
- Syzygy Tablebases
- UCI Protocol
- Lichess Bot API
- FIDE Time Controls
Infrastructure
- Spectrum-X Networking
- Infiniband NDR800
- HBM3e Memory
- RAPIDS Analytics
- Nsight Systems
- Container-ready
Documentation
Everything you need to get started and master NIKOLA
Get in Touch
Have questions about NIKOLA or want to contribute to the project? We'd love to hear from you. Join our community of chess enthusiasts and AI researchers.