Chess Programming Links

The game-playing techniques used so far for Octi come mainly from the chess-programming literature. If you are interested in writing computer programs that play abstract strategy games, you might find the following papers and links helpful:

• Tony Marsland gives a good overview of how chess programs work in The Anatomy of Chess Programs.
• Bruce Morland has good explanations, including both pseudocode and a working chess program, in the Programming Topics section of his computer chess page.
• Ernst Heinz has a description of DarkThought, a competitive chess program.
• The journals of the International Computer Games Association contain many good articles about specific techniques.
• Aske Plaat has a very readable explanation of mtd(f), one of the better search algorithms around.
• Another popular search algorithm is NegaScout; for which its inventor gives source code on his web site.
• A very brief introduction to bitboards is available.
• Chessopolis has a page of links that's better than this.

By Charles Sutton, at casutton@cs.umass.edu. Last modified 20 Sept 2003.