In 1999, when I was working as an [ICT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_communications_technology) consultant for [CMG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMG_%28company%29) (now [Logica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logica)), some colleagues started a company competition for who could write the best chess engine. It took me two weeks to create something in [Java](Java "Java"), and although it was slow and only searched 5 plies deep, it did manage to beat the competition, which incidentally consisted of the two tournament organisers themselves only. Later, when I first learned about [bitboards](Bitboards "Bitboards"), I just had to give that idea a try and I wrote a new Java engine based on that technique. And although it eventually did fairly well (it was probably 2500-2600 elo'ish), it turned out that Java just wasn't fast enough to be competitive.  Have become fully infected by the computer chess virus by that time, I switched to [C++](Cpp "Cpp") and eventually I created Bright.