amoeba, a chess engine written in D

[Richard Delorme via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Saturday, 21 May 2016 at 00:29:13 UTC, extrawurst wrote:
> Two questions:
> 1) If it is using UCI protocol I guess there are other engines 
> that you can compare amoeba with when it comes to performance 
> and other aspects, did you ?

Yes, It is a strong program, but far from the top programs yet.
In the ccrl scale: http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/
I guess its rating is close to 2700.
The move generator is pretty fast, though:
$ amoeba-linux-x64-sse4.2 perft -d 7
perft  7 :      3195901860 leaves in     17.920 s    178344094 
leaves/s

In comparison, stockfish 7, one of the strongest chess program in 
C++:
$ stockfish-7
perft 7
[...]
Total time (ms) : 16669
Nodes searched  : 3195901860
Nodes/second    : 191727269

So my implementation of a different algorithm in D is only 7% 
slower at generating moves, which is negligible in the overall 
program.

> 2) It would be awesome if you could write down how it was to 
> use D for that project as someone freshly coming from C. What 
> were the reasons you chose D, what did you like, what did u 
> hate ? That would help you being read on reddit by a hundred 
> blood thursty devs (street cred and all) and us for knowing 
> what we can improve and also get the PR :)

Good idea, I will try to write something clever and constructive 
within the next days.

--
Richard