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Subject: Re: Chess engine in Perl?

Author: Jason Waugh

Date: 08:02:23 03/28/04

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On March 28, 2004 at 03:24:53, Steffen Jakob wrote:

>does anybody know if there exists a chess engine which is written in Perl?


Yes, mine.  I haven't worked on it in a while and it is not ready for play, so I
have not released it as yet.  I've got two versions on the go -- one in perl
that is slow, and one in perl w/the intense bits done using Inline::C

Somebody else on a mailing list tried as well, but I think he gave up after
deciding perl can never make an engine fast enough to be "competitive".  I just
like it as a fun, research project... it's taught me a lot about how a chess
engine works.  Perl has been very useful for rapid development to test ideas.  I
was able to reimplement the same code I have now in C and optimize it quite
easily to gain 100x speed improvement over pure perl (just looking at nodes
searched in X time.  and no, it's not poor, unoptimized perl code... as the
other fellow soon found out, it's just one of those rare tasks that perl is not
so suited for)  So, I can always take the ideas I've prototyped in perl and port
them to C.  It looks as though just inlining the critical bits in C will do
though, and I can take advantage of perl to communicate with the rest of the
world (Winboard, etc.)

You might want to take a look at CPAN to see what chess modules are available -
none that are there are designed for use with an engine, but there certainly are
a few.

I really should get back at that project - haven't touched it in over 6 months.
Thanks for the reminder.

Jason
http://tools.remixer.com



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