I remember doing something very similar in college. My first cut used a hideous object model, but my second go at it used a 3 dimensional matrix to track all of the data and was much faster and space efficient.
The "Why?" at the end of the article pretty much sums up why I can't play most board games and puzzles. Once you 'solve' sudoku, chess, connect 6, ect. it really takes the fun out of it, even if your brain doesn't calculate the solution as quick as your code.
Doesn't apply to chess imho. I still keep discovering different views of the game on occasional plays. The standard algorithm takes too much time, so you have to find out how to see what's important.
I played chess for a while in a chess club. But to become any good you need to memorize a lot of positions to be able to efficiently recognize good moves. Playing creatively to have fun almost always leads to defeat.
I think you're being a bit unfair to chess, but anyway you can still play Go. I think it's far from "solved" as amateurs beat computer programs very often, as I understand.
The "Why?" at the end of the article pretty much sums up why I can't play most board games and puzzles. Once you 'solve' sudoku, chess, connect 6, ect. it really takes the fun out of it, even if your brain doesn't calculate the solution as quick as your code.