Chess-playing program in Rust

To run this:

git clone git@github.com:NashFP/computer-chess.git
cd computer-chess/jorendorff+rust
cargo run --release

Or, if you have GNU XBoard (brew install xboard):

xboard -fcp 'cargo run --release -- --xboard'

This is a straight-up port of the Haskell program in ../jorendorff+haskell. It's functionally identical; the two programs make the same moves, given the same circumstances.

Rust is not really a functional programming language. I don't know what it is, except fast. It's definitely fast. The untuned, single-threaded Rust program, using the naive minimax algorithm is faster than the slightly-tuned Haskell program, which implements alpha-beta pruning and runs on 4 cores.

The next steps for this program would be

• different heuristics for the opening and various endgames
• a better heuristic for the midgame (currently just material plus squares attacked/defended plus something for pawn structure, see fn heuristic in src/chess.rs)
• implement alpha-beta
• spread the work across multiple cores (should be easy in Rust)
• add a transposition table (a little easier in Rust than in Haskell)
• profile it