[greenpeas]

Chess Engine - is a well established term in the field. Position estimation and move generation is the hardest and most important aspect of a chess engine. In this sense chess.js may do many useful things, except the thing that would make it an "engine".

> Maybe "How to build a Chess Automaton/AI Player" would be a better title? Unless in the Chess industry the "chess engine" refers to the machine player, which I do not know.

I find this somewhat presumptuous. You wouldn't go to a different country and warn others that a particular word should mean something different based on your own (foreign language) experience, and propose a different word, with the caveat: "Unless in your country you do things differently".

If you think that your experience is common enough that a warning to fellow game-developers is warranted, do some research, find out that "Chess Engine" is a term that is contextually synonymous to "AI Player" and then inform others.

[franciscop]

Yes, I said it because if it got me by surprise, I guessed it'd get a lot of people by surprise in HN as well. Agreed with that country analogy, but I believe this being a "Hacker News forum" and not "Chess news" the analogy would be more like if a foreigner came to my country and used a word, that has a meaning in their own country, but has a different meaning in my language. I would suggest them to adapt it to the local language, or explain to my friends what he's trying to say so there's no misunderstanding.

As another commenter said "FWIW I think that without having encountered the term ('chess engine') before, connecting chess ~ game and so chess engine ~> chess game engine is a pretty reasonable path to take in interpreting unfamiliar jargon."

[greenpeas]

I think your personal experience with games and game development may predispose you to believe that the majority of HN users share your experience and cultural vocabulary. But judging by the variety of topics discussed here weekly, I think the HN community is much more diverse in its interests than you are aware of. I think we all tend to be unaware of possibilities other than the ones we're accustomed to. (I couldn't have imagined that someone would think "Game Engine" when encountering the term "Chess Engine". For me it's clearly something much closer to the concept of a "Search Engine".)

As you can also see from several replies, there are many people who are familiar with the term. Extending the previous analogy of the foreign country, it's not immediately obvious who here is the native and who is the foreigner.

> As another commenter said "FWIW I think that without having encountered the term ('chess engine') before, connecting chess ~ game and so chess engine ~> chess game engine is a pretty reasonable path to take in interpreting unfamiliar jargon."

I see the following scenario on HN very often: There is some topic, in a less mainstream field, that reaches the front page, and inevitably one of the commenters is annoyed that some term in the headline, a term that happens to be well established in the field, doesn't correspond to their expectations. It's fine to try and interpret unfamiliar jargon, but when the result doesn't match your expectations, why not inform yourself and thus expand your domain of knowledge, instead of proposing an alternative syntax, which will only cause confusion: it will confuse field experts (arguably the target audience), it will confuse newcomers to the field, and it probably won't help the general audience, since we know that naming things is hard, and what may seem clear to you won't be clear to the next person.