What chess engines lack, in my opinion, is the ability to play the natural moves.
If I were designing such algorithms, yes, I would look for solutions to make the computer play better, but I’d also look for solutions to make it play like a human.
99% of the players playing chess can’t even dream of ever beating a computer at the top level. So, they change the difficulty of the algorithm lower. What happens next is that the computer plays either incredibly good moves, or very poor ones, but they all look artificial. A human won’t be either very good or very poor, but on an overall line. Playing against the computer is chaos. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be like this.
For example, a human chess player will always look at the last moved piece, but it might ignore a piece that is not in the center of the action. A human is also more likely to see one or two moves ahead, but not a lot. A human will overlook, at times, checkmate, while a chess engine almost never, even a weak one.