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.