Chess programmer, mathematics and AI nerd, Clojurian, and macOS/iOS/visionOS developer. The original author of Stockfish, now working on The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton.
I like Bach, sci-fi, chess, ancient history, linguistics, Rubik’s cubes, and track&field.
I assume the intersection of Mastodon users, Apple users, and serious chess players is very nearly empty, but in case there are some of you out there:
The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton, my new chess app for Apple platforms, is ready for beta testing. It supports play against the computer and online (Lichess), database features, opening repertoire management with spaced repetition training, local and remote engine analysis, and more.
Want to test? Let me know!
I got myself a Chessnut e-board! Now I can play against The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton (the new chess app I’m building for Apple platforms) on a nice physical board.
@karlheinz_agsteiner I think a big reason why my port was quite straightforward was that I had lots of unit tests in all my Rust files. I don’t think Codex ever got it right at the first attempt, it just kept iterating and fixing bugs until all tests passed for every file.
Anyway, I’m also quite impressed. I’m also pleasantly surprised that I can get so close to #Rust performance using #Swift.
@karlheinz_agsteiner I did the less ambitious “please translate my UCI chess engine from Rust to Swift” just a few days ago. I didn’t do it in a single prompt for the entire project, but one prompt per source file. It worked, kind of. I ended up with something 100% functionally equivalent to the original engine, but running at about 20% of the speed. Getting to 95% of the speed took almost a full day and a lot of prompts.
Still, much less time than I would have spent porting it on my own.