My own chess engine written in Rust.
I've been thinking about writing a UCI chess engine for a while now. I was originally in awe of bots like Stockfish and Leela that achieve superhuman levels of playing, and then was inspired by an amazing pair of videos by Sebastian Lague. (1) (2)
I've been programming in C for a few semesters now and have gotten pretty good IMHO, however I lazily don't want to implement my own everything in C. C++ could be an option, and is a popular one amongst chess programmers. I hate C++ and so do other people. Moving on, I have been thinking about learning Rust for a while now, and after tinkering around in the Rust book for a while, I think this would be a nice project to go after.
I have no idea how long this is going to drag on for. I could forsee this either being a project I get to a working state after 3 months and then leave alone forever, or maybe something that occupies a small corner of my mind for the rest of eternity. Both have happened before, and I'm not going to say either way yet.
With that said, I'd like to make a UCI-compatible engine that's reasonably strong before I leave this alone.
I'm still tinkering around in the Rust book, and I think I'll try to revisit and finish this little script before I start here. Who knows where we'll go from there.