What are some good resources for writing a chess engine?
I'm interested in writing a chess engine (mostly as a learning exercise) and would be interested in any resources that people know of that could be of interest or use, anything really: Papers, Books, Theory, Tutorials, anything that could be useful.
Answer
From my archives:
- This is a useful chess programming wiki.
- This is a simple introduction to chess programming.
- This contains several easy step-by-step YouTube tutorial series' ranging from beginner to advanced level.
- This is a more advanced introduction.
- This is Adam Berent's interesting computer chess blog.
- This is a good analysis of MTD(f), an interesting search algorithm.
- This is a good guide to validation of move generation.
- This is lots of good information on the Rebel chess engine.
- This is lots of good information on the Dark Thought chess engine.
- Good information and source code for the Monsoon chess engine.
- These are more notes on chess programming.
- A reasonable introduction to rotated bitboards.
- A reasonable introduction to magic bitboards.
- A reasonable introduction to late move reductions.
- A look at null-move pruning.
- A collection of position sets for testing purposes.
- Here is an old report from 2 students who wrote a chess program.
- A bunch of miscellaneous chess programming links.
- Finally, here is Wikipedia's take on computer chess.