TALKS

Writing a Top-10 Chess Engine in Rust
RustWeek 2026
We cover some of the most interesting or unique problems we encounter writing competitive chess engines, and how Rust is excellently suited for solving these problems, enabling us to write very fast, portable code while sparing us from many errors that are nearly impossible to debug. We’ll discuss the implementation of sub-microsecond neural network inference, lock- and wait-free data structures that can be mutated by hundreds of threads in parallel, and our favorite tricks and contrivances.
recording · slides as delivered · unabridged slides (mine, Kora’s) · talk page

Methods in State-of-the-Art Computer Chess
Edinburgh University Computing Society (CompSoc)
How to make a neural network evaluate chess positions really quickly, how to search the game-tree of chess cleverly, and how to make a chess program learn by playing against itself.
slides

A Journey Through the History of Chess Programming
Or: “What Computers Can Do”.
Microsoft
An exploration of the limits and capabilities of computers through the lens of the history of chess programming. A youthful reaction to Dreyfus’s What Computers Can’t Do.
slides