Hello, and introducing Cadence (a Rust engine)

grounzero · Post by **grounzero** » Wed Oct 21, 2026 11:37 pm

Hello all,

I'm Michael, from the UK, and I've been reading here for a while. I'm writing a chess engine called Cadence, in Rust: github.com/grounzero/cadence

Where it is today:

Alpha-beta search with the usual modern pruning and reductions, and a deliberately simple hand-crafted evaluation for now
Every change is tested by SPRT on my own OpenBench instance, and kept only if it passes
It plays on Lichess as BOT Mithandros, running on a Jetson Orin Nano

The plan is to finish the current round of search work, release a stable version with proper binaries, then move to NNUE.

One question for people who have made that switch: for a first network trained on data from a hand-crafted engine, how many positions did you find you really needed before the net beat your HCE comfortably?

Thanks, and I'm looking forward to learning from you all.

Michael