I used a similar technique in a university class. We were doing a Connect 4 bot tournament, and I wanted mine to be as optimized as possible.<p>But in the end I spent all my time playing around with bitwise operations, so had no time left to add in multiple threads (so couldn't was slowed down by a factor of 4 or so) timing (so had to cut off the search early to not accidentally go over the limit), or to tweak the score heuristic.<p>Which meant my program only got second place. Still, I think the teacher enjoyed it, and there were some oohs and aahs when my program output moves basically instantly during the tournament.