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Subject: Re: How long to build your chess engine

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 10:44:08 01/06/04

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On January 06, 2004 at 13:34:31, Tord Romstad wrote:

>This is *way* too pessimistic, IMHO.  Writing a top engine is of course
>an enormous task, but creating something that plays legal and mostly
>sensible moves is only a moderatly complicated task.
>
>If you know the basic theory when you begin, writing a simple engine
>should take something like a couple of months in a low-level programming
>language like C or Java, and a couple of weeks in a high-level language
>like Lisp.

If you don't worry about the speed of your program at first, you can get
something up and working that plays sensible moves very quickly. I know this
from first hand experience. I've wasted years trying to write the absolute
fastest code :)

Do yourself a favor (the original poster), and don't worry about how fast your
program is at first. Worry more about learning how game playing algorithms work
and implement them and experiment with them. Once you become familiar with this
stuff, you can learn some clever methods for how to do things efficiently and
make your program fast, and you can probably rewrite your program completely in
a very short time (a few days or weeks, depending upon how much time per day you
can spend programming).



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