This time around, I shall tell you about the royal game, i.e. chess, or rather of my humble attempts at contributing to its rich ecosystem of non-human players.

The Royal Game

by Philipp Lenk

From the article

I will begin by explaining what I am talking about, briefly recap the fascinating history of computer chess and in the course of that highlight the importance of game playing for showcasing, popularizing and driving machine intelligence research as well as its public perception. I shall further elaborate on my personal connection and love for the game and detail why - even in the face of a recent uptake of machine learning based techniques far more successful than my puny attempts could ever hope to be - an old-school, classical approach can still be a valuable investment of time and energy.
Afterwards [...] I will get just a little more technical and provide a high level explanation of the general structure underlying many chess playing programs, culminating in a walkthrough of code implementing the UCI protocol used to communicate with GUIs and other programs pitting different human and non-human connoisseurs of the game against one another.