If you were going to write a chess game engine, what programming paradigm would you use (OOP, procedural, etc) and why whould you choose it ? By chess engine, I mean the portion of a program that evaluates the current board and decides the computer's next move.

I'm asking because I thought it might be fun to write a chess engine. Then it occured to me that I could use it as a project for learning functional programming. Then it occured to me that some problems aren't well suited to the functional paradigm. Then it occured to me that this might be good discussion fodder.