What would be the best language to use to program chess in with rules based system? ie instead of concretely coding a minimax alpha beta, you give it general rules about how things can moved.

all the predicate logic systems seem to be more suited around determining what something is, rather than figuring out how to efficiently reach a goal state... but I want to be able to use predicate style logic to figure out how to do stuff.

or another way to relate this question, I'm looking for a language that could search a conceptual graph that is constantly changing

say I want to find a way to pick up a bag. but the bag has to weigh under 5 pounds, and it contains 10 2lb stones. in this trivial example the only thing you can do is pick up the bag, take a stone out, or put one back in. what language would allow me to easily represent the changing weight of the bag, and search through taking 3 stones out and picking the bag up?

I could write my own stuff in lisp or something (I've thought a lot about it, stacks to keep track of possible changes to objects as you're searching through rules, etc), but I figure somebody must already have come up with something that does this, so I can just concentrate on the logic

thanks!