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.
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.
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.
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.
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.