Hey guys, I would like ask whether you know some good book which is about computer chess programming. I want book, which explains algorithms, structures and strategies well. thanks.

I have a couple of books on the subject, but I can hardly recommend them. My favorite resource for chess programming was Bruce Moreland's website on the subject. The website is no longer available, but you can still access a copy of it here: http://web.archive.org/web/20070707012511/www.brucemo.com/compchess/programming/index.htm

This wiki also seems like it could be good: https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/

The ICGA (formerly known as ICCA) has had a quarterly journal going on for many years, and there are some good articles there. But you won't get much out of them until you get the basics down, so start with the links above.

thanks for answer. The website, that you linked here seems to be good, but if you have good tip on usable book, i would be happy to know it, becasue in this case i preffer book more than website.

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Original post by MrProper I would like ask whether you know some good book which is about computer chess programming. I want book, which explains algorithms, structures and strategies well.

They are old (originally published in the early 1980s) but David Levy's books are very readable and for hobbyist programming still very relevant.

I highly recommend his Computer Gamesmanship book. It discusses chess in a lot of detail but also lots of other games including Othello, Backgammon, Gomoku, Poker, etc. It is very 'popular science" and therefore very accessible and good fun to read.

Trivia: the above edition of the book appears to be a reprint. I have the original published by Century Publishing in 1983. Most, if not all, of the book chapters first appeared as articles in the English print magazine Personal Computer World circa 1980-1981.


Levy's Computer Chess Compendium is a more serious book, edited by Levy. Still old, and therefore not state-of-the-art, but it's a good second book after Computer Gamesmanship.

Levy also has a third book, How Computers Play Chess, but I never saw it so I cannot personally recommend it, though I would expect it to be a good read.


You can find a lot of resources online too if you look. Certainly a lot of papers, including the "ur-paper" by Claude Shannon:

Programming a Computer for Playing Chess
CLAUDE E. SHANNON
Philosophical Magazine, Ser.7, Vol. 41, No. 314 - March 1950.

It's a bit hardcore reading, as it's basically one big Z80 assembler listing, but Dan and Kathe Spracklen's book SARGON: A computer chess program, while not terribly relevant today, is still a historical document. (SARGON was one of the first commercially available computer chess programs.)

Also, there's tons of research papers on improvements over the basic alpha-beta search algorithm described in Levy's books above, including NegaScout, MTD(f), etc. I wouldn't worry about these algorithms and other papers until well after you have a program up and running, actually playing chess.