From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2006-03-16T15:13:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Chess engine in ruby?

Jeff Cohen wrote:
> I'm a beginning chess player and a beginning Ruby developer :-)  I was  
> wondering if there's a Ruby chess engine somewhere.
> 
> I thought it might be interested to read the code and see if I get  
> better at Ruby, or chess, or both.
> 
> I'm also interested to see if the Ruby code is more understandable - in  
> the past I tried to understand C and Java engines without much luck.
> 
> If you've heard of some kind of chess engine written in Ruby, could you  
> let me know?

I don't know of one, but the idea is interesting.

It might not be practical because of speed. Most chess algorithms
are very search-intensive.

Now, one thing I've thought about but will never have the time to
implement -- make it a distributed application (with drb) so that
the work can be split among different machines.

Now *that* would be interesting. And if you throw enough boxes
at it, you eliminate the speed issue. You could in theory produce
a distributed chess app in Ruby that was "as fast" as a non-
distributed one in C.

Just a thought.


Cheers,
Hal