Using self-written engine

@1

There are already a lot of chess (FIDE chess) engines around, from very weak to a very strong where human has no chance at all.

Instead I suggest you go for chess variants, like crazyhouse, or perhaps racing kings or maybe atomic.

@10, But the rating DOES influence the pairings. E.g. I filter out any challenges more than 300 points below my rating.
@11, sure but there's no point in trying something as difficult as crazyhouse if I haven't even managed a basic chess engine. It's more like a training thing for more difficult stuff if you get what I mean.

#1 I like this idea; please be informed that (as #5 says) at present, lichess rules suggest you can only use assistance with opponents' consent for casual (unrated) games.

#8 Personally, I think you are right although the downside here is that legalizing use (without providing an interface) means people will develop a variety of point-and-click software, some of which may be harder to detect than others. I'm developing a more resilient detector and hoping one day we'll be ready to legalize assisted play.

@12

In that case, I would highly recommend racing kings variant. There are no pawns in this variant, checking a king is illegal, and kings are not allowed to move to a square where your opponent attacks it (just similar to normal chess). The evaluation is not complicated, the search would be similar to a normal chess. The goal is for a king to reach the 8th rank. This variant is simplier, no ep capture, no castle, no pawn promotion.

I have an engine to play this crazyhouse variant, I don't think people like to play the engine, the engine is very smart in dropping pieces so I stopped its development.

A good sequence could be.

1. racing kings

2. normal chess
a. FRC
b. King of the hill

3. atomic

4. crazyhouse

Good luck with your development.

I could do that the problem is that the evaluation IS difficult for racing kings. Not because it's something really tricky or anything, it's just that I am a reasonably strong chess player (to at least write a simple eval) while I have absolutely no knowledge about racing kings. Also normal chess can be played on any GUI (like chessbase, arena, scid etc.).
But thanks for your willingness. ;)
As soon as I have something sort of working I will post here so the people here can try out the engine themselves. ;)

EDIT: Thanks for your willingness to help.

#15 For what it's worth, I have a Racing Kings engine:
http://en.dugovic.mooo.com/setup/ai

Wow, thank you, Toadofsky! This is a marvelous thing. Will it exist all the time?

It lacks only antichess.

#15

Wow, that's great! Does this mean that all of the engines on that site are actually coming to lichess soon? I understand that they're not perfect (especially the Atomic engine, level 8 is even beatable by me), but it would still be really cool.

#19

I have no doubt that they can add Antichess, since it mainly exists out of calculating forced lines and how to avoid them.