Using Haskell to debug a C chess engine

#1

Post by mrkgnao » Fri, Oct 13, 2017, 12:51 PM UTC

Using Haskell to debug a C chess engine
michaelburge.us

Re: Using Haskell to debug a C chess engine

#2

Post by icantrank » Fri, Oct 13, 2017, 10:36 PM UTC

do it with checkers

Re: Using Haskell to debug a C chess engine

#3

Post by nandemo » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 7:05 AM UTC

Personally, I think an engine written in Haskell would be more interesting. Given how ridiculously strong some engines are when running on commodity hardware, a little performance hit wouldn't be the end of the world.

Re: Using Haskell to debug a C chess engine

#4

Post by MichaelBurge » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 8:09 AM UTC

nandemo wrote: post #3

Personally, I think an engine written in Haskell would be more interesting. Given how ridiculously strong some engines are when running on commodity hardware, a little performance hit wouldn't be the end of the world.

I probably won't do an article on it, but I did have a couple-years old Shogi engine in Haskell:

Implementation: https://bitbucket.org/MichaelBurge/shogi/src/f2370832b328ae1...

Tests: https://bitbucket.org/MichaelBurge/shogi/src/f2370832b328ae1...

The code & style are pretty similar between the Haskell and the C. I found the C easier to write: The C engine was written and debugged within about 3 days, while the Haskell Shogi engine has a couple weeks of commits.

Re: Using Haskell to debug a C chess engine

#5

Post by thomasvarney723 » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 12:09 PM UTC

MichaelBurge wrote: post #4

nandemo wrote: post #3

Personally, I think an engine written in Haskell would be more interesting. Given how ridiculously strong some engines are when running on commodity hardware, a little performance hit wouldn't be the end of the world.

I probably won't do an article on it, but I did have a couple-years old Shogi engine in Haskell: Implementation: https://bitbucket.org/MichaelBurge/shogi/src/f2370832b328ae1... Tests: https://bitbucket.org/MichaelBurge/shogi/src/f2370832b328ae1... The code & style are pretty similar between the Haskell and the C. I found the C easier to write: The C engine was written and debugged within about 3 days, while the Haske…

Why do you think the C was easier to write?

Re: Using Haskell to debug a C chess engine

#6

Post by mrkgnao » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 2:23 PM UTC

thomasvarney723 wrote: post #5

MichaelBurge wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably won't do an article on it, but I did have a couple-years old Shogi engine in Haskell: Implementation: https://bitbucket.org/MichaelBurge/shogi/src/f2370832b328ae1... Tests: https://bitbucket.org/MichaelBurge/shogi/src/f2370832b328ae1... The code & style are pretty similar between the Haskell and the C. I found the C easier to write: The C engine was written and debugged within about 3 days, while the Haske…

Why do you think the C was easier to write?

I looked a few things up after Michael's post, and it seems there are a lot of resources and codified idioms around writing chess engines in C. (E.g. tons of bit-twiddling hacks, many related to the fortuitous existence of 64-bit integers. [Not that you can't do those in Haskell.])