Writing a top-10 chess engine in Rust

by Cosmo Bobak and Kora

We’ll 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.

Picture of Kora

Kora

she/her
Senior GPU Architect at Nvidia Corporation
Links:

Kora is a GPU Architect at Nvidia. She began learning Rust five years ago by writing a chess engine, and both subjects have been (to a much greater degree than she anticipated) significant parts of her life ever since.

Picture of Cosmo Bobak

Cosmo Bobak

any/all
Software Developer at Esri
Links: icon of bluesky

Cosmo is a software developer at Esri who has been writing Rust for almost five years now.

They care very much about the correctness and performance of software, and are the author of the UK’s strongest chess-playing program.