I am starting to write a chess program. I was wondering if there is a book which would cover alpha-beta, tree-searching in general, transposition tables, data structures, algorithms etc. Basically, all the material needed for a decent chess program. Thanks, Arshad

Your best bet is to use online resources. You should be able to find everything you need on websites and from message boards and newsgroups.

Thanks, I''ll do that. But, there must be some book out there!

Arshad

I did a little emailing and the only book everyone recommends is Scalable Search in Computer Chess by Ernst Heinz. I''m not sure that it''s really a beginner''s book though. I haven''t read it. The general consensus about computer chess books (besides the one I already mentioned) was that they are mostly old and out of date, and what you find on the web will be more up to date.

I think Marcel Kervinck''s master thesis is a very good place for a beginner to start. It''s fairly lengthy compared to most online resources (more than 50 pages I think). You''ll need a post script viewer to read it. I use Ghost to read postscript files.

I learned a lot when I first started from these links:
Bruce Moreland''s computer chess topics
James Swafford''s website
Colin Frayn''s website
Gamedev.net''s chess programming article

Introduction to Algorithms

A relatively cheap & good book(to me at least) I''m currently studying is
Introduction to Computing and Algorithms by Russell L. Shackelford published by Addison Wesley.