A minimax chess engine in regular expressions

That is quite literally a work of art.

It’s very fun and impressive but it’s absolutely not a single call.

That makes sense: As far as I understand, OpenGL 2.0 and beyond don’t really provide much fixed-function/predefined logic anymore, e.g. I believe you need to provide your own vertex and pixel shaders.

You could argue that rasterization itself is being taken care by the implementation, though.

It's a line from the movie Jurassic Park. Pretty sure they're just joking.

No, it takes (1) knowing what you learn in a compilers class (or upper level math classes) and (2) putting it to work. He didn't write 80,000 regular expressions, he wrote a compiler that wrote those expressions. Commercial-quality compilers are hard to write but simple compilers are straightforward if you know the fundamentals.

It's like the problem of solving the Rubik's cube. If you look at it in terms of geometry and spatial intuition it's intractable. If you treat it as an abstract algebra problem and break it down into "solve the top of the cube, solve the middle row of the cube, solve the bottom of the cube" and then develop a set of operators that will let you permute certain parts of the cube it takes a moderate amount of skill, persistence and concentration.

CS students do exercises such as writing moderately complex programs for a Turing machine and it's an exercise like what he did.

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Funny my project last month was a chess engine. For a long time I'd wondered if I could make a decent MCTS chess engine but someone close to me has been getting serious about chess (usually wins against the random person, usually loses at the chess club, is fighting hard to get up the bracket) so writing a program that was a match for him seemed like a fun and meaningful project and I decided to try the conventional route of alpha-beta search.

If you tried to write a chess engine from zero you'd probably struggle, but the lifetime value you get out of education (CS or otherwise) is looking things up the literature, learning from other people's experiences, and putting it to work. So this has been my guide

https://www.chessprogramming.org/Main_Page

I started out with Python with the goal of making something tiny and stylish and started out with a move generator from

https://python-chess.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

and once I got the signs right in alpha-beta negamax (when I had them wrong it discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fool%27s_mate) it beat my tester several times before he regrouped, traded a knight for a good pawn structure, and got his first win.

The next goal is to take it to the chess club which means it has to respect time control. I switched to Java because its faster and because it is easy to have a comms thread interrupt a think thread. The first try wasn't faster because my move ordering was terrible. I was much faster implementing it though because I could cut and paste the test cases I had in Python and if I knew anything at this point it was the signs in negamax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_deepening_depth-firs... is not only good for time control but gets better move ordering and I'm in the middle of implementing that. It would take me years to find out that Iterative Deepening works a lot better than you might expect, the Killer Heuristic, etc. Reading is my superpower.

Is this balanced or not: ((((((((((((((((((((())))))))))))))))))))? Humans can check only so many parentheses before losing track of them, so it is still an FSM in my opinion.

Also, those regexes are directly translated from the equivalent and much smaller FSM. Regexes are necessarily complex only because they have Kleene stars and nothing else; it's like representing every Boolean circuits with NAND, which is of course possible and a little fun fact but the process itself isn't exactly fun to me.