[dmlittle]

Thank you for TA'ing the class! I took it in 2015 and TAs really made the class for myself and most of my friends.

Is the end of semester Leisserchess competition still going? I believe I heard that the year you TA'd it (might have been a year before or after) a group finally compiled an opening playbook and beat everyone in the class

[explaininjs]

I haven’t followed the course closely, but I’d assume there’s still some variation of the game going on, Charles was quite fond of it.

I’m not sure what you mean by “finally complied an opening book”, by the time I was involved with the class opening books were table stakes and we even included code to generate them as part of the starting distribution. They’re somewhat useful, but effective culling of the search space in multithreaded contexts is far more important. The opening book can only ever help for the first few ply, after that the engine which can consistently think a move ahead will likely win. (Indeed the staff designed the rules to optimize for that very property). A quick and informative heuristic function is of course also critical.