It's strange that almost no one commenting on this has the faintest idea how chess programs work. Chess programs score moves by scoring and comparing, recursively, many millions of positions.
Actually, I wrote one as a senior project years ago. It worked exactly that way, with the exception that the number of positions was less, owed to the available computing power.
Concept was the same as you describe. No rocket science. I purposely read nothing beforehand, because I wanted to devise an approach and this seemed the most obvious.
Of course, nowadays that is not the only technique in use.
In any case, I'm not sure why you think it impossible to add any additional analysis to the program as it repeatedly scores millions of positions.
