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A comment on Sunfish: A simple but strong chess engine written in Python. Parent comment

Re:Sunfish: A simple but strong chess engine written in Python by Recursing on Saturday June 01, 2019 @05:49PM (#20071907)
It's not meant to be a competitive engine, after all, it's written in 111 lines of python.

I think it could be very useful for didactic purposes, or for getting started. Not having all the extra complexities needed for efficient board representation, position evaluation, move generation etc... makes the big picture much clearer imvho

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Re:Sunfish: A simple but strong chess engine written in Python by thom on Saturday June 01, 2019 @05:53PM (#20071927)
Yeah, I totally agree that eval + search is the first step to learn, in terms of overall structure. And this includes lots of important concepts like quiescence search etc. I just think it's worth being honest: you either need really good eval or really fast search just to give _yourself_ a good game.
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Re:Sunfish: A simple but strong chess engine written in Python by Recursing on Saturday June 01, 2019 @06:39PM (#20072150)
You are welcome to try to play my rust rewrite of this exact engine on lichess https://lichess.org/@/sunfish_rs

If you're not a top 5% player, it can absolutely give you a good game (especially on fast time controls)

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Re:Sunfish: A simple but strong chess engine written in Python by thomasahle on Saturday June 01, 2019 @06:47PM (#20072211)
That is cool! I've thought about making a rust version of Sunfish, and I didn't even know this existed!
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