Still, do yourself a favour. Write a chess program. Observe that we reduced the search depth to make it more applicable. This is an example of the often encountered trade-offs in engineering. Actually, that's where the trick lies, because everybody knows how to do the work, but the fastest wins.
Heuristics is the name for making wise trade-offs.
Imagine a heuristic to be a tour guide that takes you to the best places in the shortest time. Another example would be a car parking process. The driver parks his car to the first place he finds when he is close enough to his destination, although there might be empty places nearer ahead. Similarly you can stop branching your game tree at really stupid moves before full depth, and although that move might be an utterly clever trap, the odds are very high that it is not, and your program will only run faster. This is called alpha- beta pruning, or pruning for short.