Is the end of semester Leisserchess competition still going? I believe I heard that the year you TA'd it (might have been a year before or after) a group finally compiled an opening playbook and beat everyone in the class
I’m not sure what you mean by “finally complied an opening book”, by the time I was involved with the class opening books were table stakes and we even included code to generate them as part of the starting distribution. They’re somewhat useful, but effective culling of the search space in multithreaded contexts is far more important. The opening book can only ever help for the first few ply, after that the engine which can consistently think a move ahead will likely win. (Indeed the staff designed the rules to optimize for that very property). A quick and informative heuristic function is of course also critical.
(Though I’m currently backpacking through the Andes so you may need to be patient)