A Beginner's Guide to Chess Programming

Welcome to the Beginner's Guide to Chess Programming. This guide was put together to help people who are unfamiliar with AI technology to develop chess programs of their own - because it's so cool to write software that can beat you! This guide should be pretty much language-neutral, and certainly only covers the basics. However, having read and implemented what you will find here, you should have a fair program, and a basis to understand the more specialised terms and discussions you'll find elsewhere on the Net.

This guide was developed by Adam Oellermann. While no professional, I enjoy tinkering with this stuff. I have written a strong Draughts engine, Deep Brew, and a reasonable chess-playing engine (Blikskottel). I hope this guide goes some way to getting you started. If you are struggling, you can email me (adam@oellermann.com).

Enjoy!

NB: If you haven't spotted it yet, you can navigate around this section of the site using the menu on the left.