Beating myself at chess
4 months ago
- #programming
- #chess
- #nostalgia
- Created a chess AI to beat the author, who admits to being terrible at chess.
- Motivated by experimenting with development environments, simplicity, and potential portability to vintage computers.
- Used a nostalgic, minimal development setup: GNU Screen, Vim, entr, and w3m on a netbook.
- Developed the chess engine in C with zero dependencies, fixed memory usage, and under 600 lines of code.
- Compiled to WebAssembly, resulting in under 6 KB, with potential to run on old systems like DOS or Amiga.
- Initially skipped writing tests but later had to create a test framework to fix bugs during refactoring.
- Integrated with XBoard using a simple text protocol and browsers via cm-chessboard and WebAssembly.
- The AI successfully beats the author, though its ability against others is untested.
- Recommends the project for practicing programming or testing new languages/paradigms.