All About Chess And Computers

All About Chess and Computers

For some time now, I have felt that the time is right to write a book about Computer Chess. Ever since the first attempts at chess pro gramming were made, some twenty five years ago, interest in the subject ha"s grown from year to year. During the late 1950s the subject was first brought to the attention of the public by an article in Scient(fic American, and less than a decade later a chess program was competing in a tournament with humans. More recently, there have been tournaments in which the only participants were computer programs. and when the first World Computer Championship was held in Stockholm in 1974 the event was an outstanding success. Laymen often doubt the value of investing in a subject so esoteric as computer chess, but there is definitely considerable benefit to be gained from a study of the automisation of chess and other intellectual games. If it proves possible to play such games well by computer, then the techniques employed to analyse and assess future positions in these games will also be useful in other problems in long-range planning. I have tried to make this book both interesting and instructive. Those who understand anything at all about chess but who have no knowledge of computers, will be able to follow my description of how computers play chess. Those with a knowledge of both areas will still find much to interest them.

All about Chess and Computers

Computers, Chess, and Cognition

Computers, Chess, and Cognition presents an excellent up-to-date description of developments in computer chess, a rapidly advancing area in artificial intelligence research. This book is intended for an upper undergraduate and above level audience in the computer science (artificial intelligence) community. The chapters have been edited to present a uniform terminology and balanced writing style, to make the material understandable to a wider, less specialized audience. The book's primary strengths are the description of the workings of some major chess programs, an excellent review of tree searching methods, discussion of exciting new research ideas, a philosophical discussion of the relationship of computer game playing to artificial intelligence, and the treatment of computer Go as an important new research area. A complete index and extensive bibliography makes the book a valuable reference work. The book includes a special foreword by Ken Thompson, author of the UNIX operating system.