or “Help me learn Rust by pairing with me”

After years working in interpreted languages (Ruby, JavaScript) I recently discovered Rust. As I sadly don’t have the opportunity to use Rust directly in a client project, I decided to come up with a toy project to help me learn the language.

As Rust is supposedly good for programs that actually need raw speed (unlike the web apps I generally write) I decided to come back to one of my old time favourites: an artificial intelligence for the game of Go.

I had already tried writing a few of those in recent years (including helping Jason House with his bot written in D), but every time I had the problem that working alone wasn’t very motivating so I never managed to produce a working program.

To combat this I’m trying to pair program with people (i.e. you) to keep me going. So if you’re interested in either learning Rust with me or writing an AI for the game of Go, please get in touch!

Currently (as of April 2014) the project is still in it’s infancy (actually no code was written, yet), but please check out the repository and Trello board.

If you’re new to Rust I suggest the 30-minute Introduction to Rust, The Rust Language Tutorial, and Rust by Example as a start. If you’re new to the game of Go … well there’s a whole Wiki about it! And for computer go related content the best place is the computer-go mailing list.

So, please get in touch so that we can get this started!