This article is part of a series – the contents page is here.
In earlier articles we’ve seen the code for generating moves. Before we use it to build a playing engine, let’s take a detour and consider how we’re going to run that engine.
We’ve already identified that, thanks to the vastness of chess’s move tree, our engine could be slow to run. Sophisticated modern engines can generate strong moves in just a few milliseconds, but unfortunately such speed and strength is beyond the scope of this project. We’re going to have to wait a few seconds for Shallow Thought to calculate its moves. [Update – March 2023: back in 2017 I noted that Shallow Thought ran much faster on Chrome than on Edge. Nowadays I would say that, if anything, Edge has the ‘edge’ in speed].
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