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Subject: Re: Are there books/magazines on chess algorithms in print?

Author: Dan Newman

Date: 11:36:02 09/11/98

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On September 10, 1998 at 20:37:54, John Coffey wrote:

>I requested info on chess algorithms, and several people have directed me toward
>freeware programs that are on the net.
>
>Are there any sources in print?  I know that there was a 1991 book called
>"How Computers Play Chess" but 1991 seems a bit dated.
>
>Thanks,
>
>John Coffey

I haven't seen "How Computers Play Chess" (by David Levy and Monty
Newborn) on the bookshelves recently, so I suspect it's out of
print--you could look on amazon.com.  It is, I believe, about the
latest computer chess book of its sort yet published.  (There may
be one of the "Advances in Computer Chess nn" published later than
this, though.)  This book is about the best of the Levy books, I
think, and is the book I've gone back to the most.

There are several other computer chess books (all predating "How
Computers Play Chess" and likely out of print), some of which you
might find worthwhile:

"Chess Skill in Man and Machine", R.W.Frey, ed.
    Lots of interesting articles.

"Computers, Chess, and Cognition", Marsland & Schaeffer, eds.
    Lots of interesting articles.

"Computer Chess Compendium", Levy, ed.
    This one has a lot of rather old articles, some of which
    are rather outdated, but it has the article by Shannon
    which I found interesting to read as well as  .

"Computer Games I" and "Computer Games II", Levy, ed.
    These two have articles on a lot of different games including
    chess, checkers, go, gomoku, backgammon, and so on.  Only
    one of them has articles on chess though.

"The Joy of Computer Chess", Levy
    I had this one before "How Computers Play Chess" and in some
    respects it is superceeded by the later book.  It goes into
    more detail about move generation though...

"Computer Gamesmanship", Levy
    Discusses game tree search and several different games including
    chess.

"Computer Chess II", Welsh & Baczynskyj
    I've never seen "Computer Chess I" and have wondered what
    was in it, but "Computer Chess II" has a chapter on search
    algorithms with some pseudo-code that I found useful--the
    rest of the book seems to be mostly descriptions of various
    chess programs and tournament games.

"Chess and Machine Intuition", Atkinson.
    I don't really remember what this one is about, though I
    do remember it as having some fairly interesting
    dicussions.

A lot of what I've learned I've picked up here (CCC) or elsewhere
on the net (various chess/checkers programming sites, rgcc, etc.),
the rest from the above books and various papers.

Interesting places to visit:
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~verhelst/chess/programming.html
    http://www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/~icca/
    http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~plaat/mtdf.html
    http://www.cs.rulimburg.nl/~uiterwyk/cg.htm
    http://forum.swarthmore.edu/~jay/learn-game/index.html
    http://home.fda.net/~wzrdking/
    http://www.cs.rulimburg.nl/~uiterwyk/cg.htm

Some sites that have papers on line:
    http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~plaat/minimax.html
    http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~jonathan/publications.html
    http://www.cs.rulimburg.nl/~breuker/
    ftp://ftp.cs.rulimburg.nl/pub/papers/

Recently I subscribed to the ICCA (Internation Computer Chess
Association) Journal and got a number of back issues with
interesting articles.  A subscription to ICCAJ wouldn't hurt,
though the articles aren't generally in any way tutorial--for
that you need one of Levy's books I think.
See: http://www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/~icca/journal.htm for subscription
info.

-Dan.



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