Well, I started writing my first chess engine (Weini) in december 2016 during Christmas hollydays. I was playing chess a little when I was young and was playing a lot on Lichess in 2016. Learning about chess programming is a great experience but as you know it is also quite frustrating at some point.maksimKorzh wrote: ↑Thu Nov 01, 2018 9:00 am Vivien, it's I'm so happy people are gaining interest in minimalist chess, I've found your minic engine idea to be very interesting. Unfortunately it's not always easy to define the true goals while writing a minimalist chess, I mean what kind of minimalism is about to prefer - minimalist RAM usage/minimalist source code/minimalist design and features. How did you come with an idea to write minic? What are your goals? I really wonder.
Weini, as my first chess engine, was built and refactored during the development process but even with a lot of logging, testing and debugging, desactivating features and testing everything again, Weini is still stuck around 2200 elo. I see Xiphos and Rofchade being developped quite quickly and reach >2800elo, that was a great source of frustration ! but also a source of motivation to achieve better results. So I have two plans ahead for Weini : switch to bitboard to gain some speed and find some horrible bugs. But I don't want to do that directly in Weini's code and I thought, on a saturday morning, that is may be a good idea so build a small code to investigate both bitboard (attak, evaluation, and move generation) and maybe to find bug during the process because I used in Minic exactly the same stuff as in Weini. That's how Minic was born.
For 3 weeks now, I didn't developed in Weini, and it feels quite fun to try to make Minic smarter while keeping it under 2000sloc.