Yeah, chess engines are a good call. They're often relatively small and self-contained, and feature a lot of good programming tricks and optimizations. I have r

Yeah, chess engines are a good call. They're often relatively small and self-contained, and feature a lot of good programming tricks and optimizations. I have read some of the Stockfish code, but if were going for something more "classic" I might try to dig into GNU Chess, Fruit, or Crafty.