chess AI for GAE

Question

I am looking for a Chess AI that can be run on Google App Engine. Most chess AI's seem to be written in C and so can not be run on the GAE. It needs to be strong enough to beat a casual player, but efficient enough that it can calculate a move within a single request (less than 10 secs).

Ideally it would be written in Python for easier integration with existing code.

I came across a few promising projects but they don't look mature:

• http://code.google.com/p/chess-free
• http://mariobalibrera.com/mics/ai.html

Answer 1

What's wrong with PyChess? It's pure Python, fairly mature, and will certainly be able to beat a casual player.

It's been a while since I've used PyChess, but a quick glance through some of the source does indicate that you can set a time limit on how long to search for a move.

The PyChess engine that is written in pure Python is in pychess.Utils. Specifically, if you look at pychess.Utils.lutils, you can see for instance the move generator written in Python.

Answer 2

This problem is a poor match for the GAE architecture, which is designed for efficient CRUD operations, and not CPU-intensive tasks. In practice, anything that takes more than a few tens of milliseconds per request will blow out your CPU quota pretty quickly.