Building a chess engine in Rust
1. Teaching a computer what a chessboard is
Bitboards, magic numbers, and the first 10,000 bugs
2. My first shitty playable bot
Negamax, alpha-beta, and the joy of watching it lose
3. Giving it eyes: a handcrafted evaluation
Material, piece-square tables, and the art of scoring a position
4. Speaking UCI: making your engine talk to the world
The protocol that lets chess engines exist
5. The search for better search
Iterative deepening, pruning, and thinking deeper without thinking longer
6. Standing on the shoulders of PeSTO
Better piece-square tables and the limits of handcrafted evaluation
7. The neural network that broke everything
Switching to NNUE, training with Bullet, and the regressions nobody warns you about
8. Is it actually getting better?
SPRT testing, benchmarks, and the discipline of not fooling yourself