Hacker Neus
I made a chess engine today, and made it fit within 2KB.
I used a variant of MinMax called Negamax, with alpha beta pruning. For the board representation I have used a 120-cell "mailbox". I managed to squeeze in checkmate/stalemate in there, after trimming out some edge cases.
I am a great fan of demoscene (computer art subculture) since middle school, and hence it was a ritual i had to perform.
For estimating the Elo, I measured 240 automated games against Stockfish Elo levels (1320 to 1600) under fixed depth-5 and some constrained rules, using equal color distribution.
Then converted pooled win/draw/loss scores to Elo through some standard logistic formula with binomial 95% confidence interval.