What got you into computer chess?

[Richard Allbert]

Discovering the world of chess engines at university in 2002.

I started the university chess club, so I was interested in chess (but not a good player) - I remember seeing Arasan, playing with that, and then finding Dann Corbit's old (massive) repo with Beowulf and other engines.

I bought 'teach yourself C++ in 24hrs' and many months later the slowest, most awful engine was running. Then I started looking at the code of other engines, realized I was doing it very wrong, and took a lot from others to make Lime ( a mess), then Jabba ( a bit better). I've had many many hours of fun writing tuners, guis, tests, all sorts. It's addictive.

One of the highlights for me was taking part in Richard Pijl's tourment in Holland. Met so many of you, it was a great experience.

Last few years, family and work have limited my time, and as I'll never be a good coder, or make a strong engine for that matter, I've since tried to give a little back to the wonderful community in other ways.

[grahamj]

AlphaZero. I have a longstanding interest in machine learning, but little interest in chess except as a computational challenge. AlphaZero led to LC0 then to an interest in CUDA programming, and now I'm working on a chess engine which uses a GPU to do the last few plies of search. As I said to Srdja in an email, I'm learning CUDA anyway.

[smatovic]

AlphaZero. I have a longstanding interest in machine learning, but little interest in chess except as a computational challenge. AlphaZero led to LC0 then to an interest in CUDA programming, and now I'm working on a chess engine which uses a GPU to do the last few plies of search. As I said to Srdja in an email, I'm learning CUDA anyway.

Considering less than a year of LC0 development,
and LC0, Scorpio and Skipper as known WIP,
there is sure enough room for alternative NN gpu approaches,
bon chance Graham.

--
Srdja