A list of items to consider using:

• Board.
• Magic Bitboards.

• Traditional grid.

• Opening Books.
  • Own format.
  • Huffman.
  • Polygot.
• Random Move Generation.
• Staged Move Generation.

• Best Move (from hash table).
• Captures by most valuable victim, least valuable attacker (MVV / LVA).
• Pawn Promotion.
• History Heuristic.
• Killer Moves.

• FEN.
• PGN.

• Alpha / Beta Negamax search.
• Aspiration Windows.
• MinMax search.
• MultiPV (Single, non-PVS search).
• Multi Threading.
  • Ponder.
• Principal Variation Search (PVS).
• Quiet Search (Quiescence Search).
• End-Games.
  • Common end-games (K vs KP, K vs KQ, K v KR, K v KBN).

• Futility Pruning.
• Null Move Pruning.
• Late Move Pruning (LMP).
• Late Move Reductions (LMR).

• Standard Evaluations:
  • Mate
  • Stalemate
  • Draw by 3-fold repetition
  • Draw by insufficient material.
  • 50 moves without a capture of pawn move.
• Material Values.
  • Different values at different stages of the game (beginning, middle-game, end-game).
• Positional Knowledge.
  • Piece Locations:
    • Good and Bad squares.
    • Relative to own pieces.
    • Relative to opponent pieces.
    • Threatened pieces.
• Piece Mobility.
• Piece Occupancy.
  • Control of Center.
• End-Games.
  • Drawing end-games.
  • End-games without Pawns.
• Bishops.
  • On long diagonals.
• Bishop Pair.
  • In Open games.
• Knights.
  • In Closed games.
• Pawns.
  • Blocked.
  • Passed.
  • Passed and escorted by a piece.
  • Passed and escorted by king.
  • Passed and free.
  • Passed and unstoppable.
  • Alone pawns.
• King Safety.
  • Castled.
  • Near a semi-open file.
  • Near squares attacked by opponent.
  • Pawn Shield.

• Nodes Per Second (Search Speed).
• Depth settings.
• Perft.
• Divide.

• Seconds per move.
• Moves per time-frame.
• Bullet.
• Blitz.
• Rapid chess

• Transposition (hash) Tables.
  • Zorbrist.

• UCI Protocol
• Winboard