My puzzle-rush bot

Description

A bot coded in Python that plays puzzle rush on chess.com.

It performs the following actions:

• opens a browser (Firefox)
• visits chess.com, removes annoying banners then logs in (you need your own credentials)
• visits the puzzle rush page and clicks "Play"
• cracks puzzles one after the other* (sometimes it might fail a problem)
• once the 5 minutes countdown elapsed or if game aborted due 3 failures, takes a screenshot of its score and saves it locally in the appropriate folder

* Here is how it proceeds to solve puzzles:

It loops over the following workflow:

• parses the HTML in order to get which pieces are on which squares (it disregards castling and en passant rights at this stage; I might add this later) => selenium & beautiful soup
• processes that information (make a FEN) to convert it to Stockfish lingo => ad hoc functions
• passes the position FEN description to the Stockfish neural network, which in turn provides its best move => python-chess and ad hoc functions
• this best move is defined as a start and end square, hence pyautogui is used to click on these in order to actually complete the move
• repeats till game is over

There were several challenges, including:

• removing the annoying banners
• find the relevant piece and square data in the HTML and convert that into Stockfish-digestible language
• finetune the waiting times so as to maximize speed while preventing any crashes

OS: Windows 10 Launched via Powershell. There is still much room for improvement as this is only a first version.

• for example, using WebDriverWait... in selenium would be better than time.sleep() as it i more robust
• I noticed that my program is faster at making the first move of each challenge than the remaining moves and cannot understand why yet

Files and directories

• The main file is obvisouly main.py => just run python main.py
• bot_functions.py contains all the tailored functions that I created
• stockfish_13_win_x64_avx2.exe is the chess engine
• scores_screenshots is the directory where screenshots of scores are saved

Steps required to install the project

• the firefox driver for Selenium (this requires to add Geckodriver to PATH) (or any compatible browser of your choice)
• the stockfish engine executable (to be placed in the same directory as the main Python file)

Warnings:

• you may have to disable manually the cookies-related banner at the bottom of the page else clicks due to happen on the first rank will fail; moreover disable the squares highlighting and legal moves highlighting (else, parsing the HTML may fail.). Leave the coordinates inside board and set animation type to FAST.

• The program does not account yet for underpromotions, castling or en passant rights but can still solve most puzzles.

• some of the clicks are not robust: while clicking on "Log in" and "Play" buttons is done via selenium (so, it is robust in the sense that it uses the HTML), clicking on the squares while making a move is done via pyautogui, because playing the move by clicking via selenium was too inconvenient. Hence, this program is calibrated for a specific screen size (1920,1080). If your screen size is different, you need to adapt the coordinates of the points that are clicked (the squares) in main.py

• you cannot try accelerating the program by reducing the time.sleep() as this will induce "engine process died unexpectedly (exit code: 3221225477)"

Please use this program responsibly and respect chess.com terms of use.

Credits

I obviously did not code a chess engine myself... Kudos to the Stockfish team.