Thanks for the response, glad to hear this opinion! (+39 rp) Basically you seem to be suggesting to have a lot of heuristics to check between situations, then using some machine learning on top of it, which seems like it could be a pretty good strategy, though 'using some machine learning' is vague enough that it's a bit unclear. I think that if you can get a decent way to measure how good a position is with basic chess tactics, then you can just do a simpler search with alpha-beta pruning (just checking say 3 moves deep and seeing which one results in the best outcome according to your metric on how good a position is, if both players use that metric). Though, even if you give a supercomputer an hour to compute vs a minute, in my opinion it won't have that much benefit, 60x more operations isn't too much when a minute already allows for 10^10 operations or so... of course it can help but the base algorithm is much more important.