MattieShoes wrote:I wrote one in perl. I think nps was in 200 or 300. I eventually abandoned it because with the long capture sequences and whatnot, even a 1 ply search could take an absurd amount of time.
I think a relatively strong engine could be written in perl or one of the high level languages such as python, ruby, tcl, lua, etc. Probably a better one could be done in lua because it's impressively fast for an interpreted language.
I think you would have to give up no more than about 700 ELO for such an engine in perl, if you put the same amount of work into it that you would a C program (which is out of the question for me
I once wrote a scrabble program in perl using tk for the graphics. I did it to prove to someone that it could be done, we got into a friendly debate about whether perl was fast enough to produce a move doing a full board search in a reasonable amount of time. This was something like 10 years ago and my perl program could find the highest scoring play in seconds, something like 5-10 seconds on a LAPTOP that I had back then.
I still have the program and did a check and it now finds a move in some fraction of a second. The time it takes is still clearly perceptible, so it's something like 1/4 to a full second on my core 2 duo.
I could also put my own high level chess program out there - I have a full move generator in tcl - it's part of my autotester which plays games. So I could very quickly have a rudimentary chess program which performs an alpha/beta search with quies.
I might also have move generator logic for lua - I did build some lua based tools for chess which I don't use any longer. I don't remember if they contain a move generator.
So if someone could organize a tournament we could have the battle of the scripted language chess engines!