Author: James Robertson
Date: 00:58:07 10/27/99
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Nicolas, When I first started writing my chess program, I had never read any books, had no internet connection, no nothing. I had no programming training, no people to guide me; basically, all I had was the QBasic interpreter that came with MSDOS and my own brain. So, my first program searched a tree of exactly W^D. After I wrote my program (it could search two plies in 3 minutes on my 486, and 'handled' captures by just extending a ply if the last move was a capture), I found a book by (I think) Monty Newborn. It contained the first computer chess stuff I ever read, and I remember sitting on my couch working out trees with a pencil and paper for about three hours trying to figure out why the 'alpha-beta' algorithm worked. Eventually, it did work, and my program searched 3 plies in three minutes. :) A few months later I bought myself a C++ compiler, and learned C++ from scratch. Another while later my family got an internet connection and a whole new chess world opened up, one that I have been thrilled with and wouldn't give up for anything. The whole point of this is, I took a chess program step by step; I would encourage you to do the same. Write a search algorithm (maybe not even recursive; my first wasn't) that just searches W^D trees. If you can do it without looking at anybody else's code, all the better. Chess programming is like math; you have to 'do all the homework problems', and you're guaranteed a good grade. Add the alpha-beta algorithm next. I added it to my QBasic program before I had seen the source to any other program, so it was a completely original implementation; while clumsy, it ensured I understood what was happening completely. It took me days of work and about 50 emails to Tom Kerrigan to figure out how a quiescence search works. But since I did take the time to learn how it works, I can debug my code when something goes wrong. :) Good luck, and keep at it! Aren't you 15? I was 15 when I first started chess programming. (2 years ago!! Man, time flies.) James
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