I see what you're getting at but for whatever reason "chess engine" in fact usually refers to what you're calling the AI player -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_engine
But still, from that Wikipedia description "a chess engine is a computer program that analyzes chess or chess variant positions, and generates a move or list of moves that it regards as strongest" that's what I mean, the chess.js package does all of this except the last step (analyzing the strongest). So it seems in the industry it's a mix between the "logic gameplay" and "AI", and this article is still only about the "AI/Automaton".
> 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.
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."
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.