Writing archive

Essays and project notes published on Let's Optimize Something.

September 7, 2026 / atropos / article / 8 min A Brief History of Chess Engines From Shannon's game-tree estimate to AlphaZero: the ideas that shaped modern chess engines. Read → September 2, 2026 / atropos / article / 5 min What a Chess Engine Actually Does The first Atropos article: what chess engines actually inspect, how positions are modelled, and why search is a selection problem. Read →