Contents

Help! How Do I Use These Links?

1. Challenges to the Chess and Computer Chess Community

Over Ten years ago, I submitted a set of four objectives that I challenged the Chess world to strive for. Here I list the progress towards those challenges.

Bookup by Mike Leahy Bookup is a program for analysis of chess openings that blew me away when I first saw it. If I was competing in chess, it would be a no-brainer to buy it and use it to dramatically improve my play. If you play chess, get it and use it! http://www.bookup.com/
	Ebooks You can buy Ebooks of opening analysis and load them into Bookup and contrast them with each other, or compare them to full games you load in pgn or gm2 (MasterChess) formats. http://www.bookup.com/ebooks.htm
	Videos I won't try to explain what Bookup can do. These tutorial videos give you what you need. http://www.bookup.com/tutorial_videos.htm
	Backsolving This is the part of Bookup that excited me the most. I write in my challenges: "I was always intrigued by the possibility of putting all these positions into a single database and back-calculating the optimum moves at each position as a chess program would. This would be akin to solving the game of chess for the small sample space of positions that are in the one book of openings. What would happen? Would white be able to force an advantage? Would black be able to equalize? Or maybe white is zugzwang in the opening position, and black will come ahead.". http://www.bookup.com/backsolv.htm
	Solving the Openings They're doing it in Checkers (see the link below). Let's do the same in chess. So get to it everyone! If you publish a proven result to a chess opening, let me know and I'll list it and link to it from here. http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/

2. My own Journey into Computer Chess

Computer Chess - A Memorial to BRUTE FORCE by Louis Kessler All about my personal venture into the computer chess world. During the latter half of the 1970's my program competed in two North American Championships. A wonderful set of memories I shall not forget. http://www.lkessler.com/brutefor.shtml
	The Games of BRUTE FORCE View some of the games of my program with this marvelous game viewer generated by the Palview program. http://www.lkessler.com/b-force.shtml
An Interview with Deep Blue by John Burstow A humorous article where Deep Blue provides advice for aspiring youngsters to improve their chess. http://www.lkessler.com/deepblue.shtml
What Computer Chess Can Tell Us About Intelligence by Louis Kessler A Commentary I did for CBC Radio across Canada, broadcast on Feb 11, 2003. http://www.cbc.ca/insite/COMMENTARY/2003/2/11.html

3. Champions vs Machines

Man vs Machine - the Endless Fascination by Ram Prasad An article chronicling the most important matches to date. http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1296
Vladimir Kramnik vs Deep Fritz The official site for the Nov 25 - Dec 5, 2006 match in Bonn, Germany. Deep Fritz won with 2 wins and 4 draws. http://www.rag.de/microsite_chess_com/
Garry Kasparov vs X3DFritz A site documenting the Nov 11-16, 2003 match in New York City. This ended with 1 win each and two draws (2-2). http://www.angelfire.com/fl5/human_fan02/kvsfx3d_assoc-stor.html
	The Chess Games of Deep X3DFritz The four games of Kasparov vs X3DFritz. http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=81695
Garry Kasparov vs DeepJunior Jan 26 - Feb 7, 2003 in New York City. This ended with 1 win each and four draws (3-3). http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Garry+Kasparov%22+vs+%22Deep+Junior%22
	Broadsheet News and Internet Portal Reports Various Articles about the match from around the Internet http://www.chessbase.com/events/events.asp?pid=184
	DeepJunior Timeline by Jorn Barger A history of the development of DeepJunior. http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/deepjunior.html
	The Chess Games of Deep Junior A selection of games starting in 2001. http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=58692
Vladimir Kramnik vs Deep Fritz Information about the match played in October 4-19 2002, ending with 2 wins each and 4 draws (4-4). http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=561
	"Fritz plays somehow like... a human" An interview with Kramnik with interesting information about Fritz. http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=255
	Other Articles about this match Its very easy to still find info about the match on google because of its unique name. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22brains+in+bahrain%22
	The Chess Games of Deep Fritz A selection of games starting in 2000. http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=50406
Kasparov vs Deep Blue Rematch New York, May 3 to May 11, 1997. In 6 games, Kasparov won 2, lost 1 and 3 were drawn. Kasparov won 3.5 to 2.5. This is the original site as archived by IBM. http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/home/html/b.html
	Kasparov vs Deep Blue Rematch by Bill Wall Bill Wall's summary of the series, plus a host of other great links relating to match. http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/deepblu2.htm
	Scientific American - Kasparov vs Deep Blue Round 2 Several interesting articles, including: Analysis of the games, A visit with the Deep Blue team, Does this mean machines can think?, and A Grandmaster Chess Machine http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0002003B-840E-1CFB-93F6809EC5880000
	The Chess Games of Deep Blue 16 games from 1993 to 1997. http://www.chessgames.com/player/deep_blue.html
Kasparov vs Deep Thought This was one of the first major Man-Machine matches played in October 1989. Kasparov crushed Deep Thought 2-0. http://www.totse.com/en/technology/science_technology/chessgam.html
	Deep Thought's Evaluation Function Tuning Program by Andreas Nowatzyk (on Tim Mann's Page) Andrew was one of the contributors to the Deep Thought project while he was in grad school. http://www.tim-mann.org/deepthought.html
	The Chess Games of Deep Thought A selection of games from 1988 to 1994. http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=13728
Top Players vs Computers A number of interesting games listed from 1987 to 1997. http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=15601

4. Champions vs the World

Kasparov vs the World Home Page This first-of-its-kind event took place over 124 days during from June to October 1999. Only possible because of the internet, Kasparov played against the consensus of the rest of the world - one move per day! Kasparov won, in what he called the greatest game of his career. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_The_World
	Chess Lab Commentary by Jude Acers My favorite: A very sharp and pointed commentary on the match. http://www.chesslab.com/0799/commentary.htm

5. Computer Chess Associations

The International Computer Games Association (ICGA) Information about the society and links to society events. They were formerly the ICCA (International Computer Chess Association). http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/ICGA/
	The ICGA Journal An excellent quarterly publication, very technical in nature, with up to date news, results, and the latest algorithms used in writing computer chess programs. http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/icga/journal/
	The ICGA Journal Index An index of all past articles arranged by author. http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/icga/journal/docs/ReferentiesICGAJournal.htm
	Jaap van den Herik Jaap was the editor-in-chief of the ICCA Journal throughout the 80's and 90's. http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/~herik/
The Swedish Computer Chess Association Performs program vs program benchmarks and maintains the comprehensive Swedish Rating List. http://web.telia.com/~u85924109/ssdf/

6. Computer Chess History

Computer Chess History by Bill Wall A summary of the important events in Computer Chess - from 1947 to present. http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/comphis.htm
	ACM Computer Chess by Bill Wall Lists all the competitors and the winners at each ACM Computer Chess tournament from 1971 to 1994. http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/acm.htm
Computers also play chess, Don't They? by Jonel Ardeljan A more detailed description of computer chess history, along with about a dozen Java-playable games. http://www.chess.vrsac.com/programi/kompjuteriE.asp

7. Chess Programmers of the 70's and early 80's.

Antique Chess Programs by Carey Bloodworth A terrific resource with information about most early Chess programs, their authors, and the availability of their original source code. http://classicchess.googlepages.com/Chess.htm
Hans Berliner's Publications Author of HiTech and the developer of the B* search algorithm (and also a former World postal chess champion). He wrote or co-wrote 26 papers on Computer Chess between 1973 and 1996. http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/b/Berliner:Hans_J=.html
	The B* Tree Search Algorithm An abstract of the article about the algorithm. (I consider this to be the penultimate algorithm. Someone, please, put this into a crunching machine and you will achieve a human-like chess player of extraordinary strength - lkessler) http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/events/dls/1995-1996/Berliner.php
Murray Campbell Worked with Tony Marsland and Hans Berliner in the early 80s on Computer Chess theory. Was one of the people who worked on the 1997 version of Deep Blue. http://www.research.ibm.com/people/m/msc/
	An Enjoyable Game. How HAL plays chess. by Murray Campbell In this intriguing in-depth article, Murray explores whether the computer HAL of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey demonstrates intelligence through its chess playing. http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/Hal/chap5/five1.html
Robert Hyatt Author of CRAY BLITZ in the 70's, and the current program CRAFTY. http://www.cis.uab.edu/info/faculty/hyatt/hyatt.html
Tony Marsland Author of WITA and AWIT of the 70's. Currently the President of the International Computer Chess Association. http://web.cs.ualberta.ca/~tony/
Monroe (Monty) Newborn Professor of Computer Science at McGill University in Montreal, author of Ostrich (1972-1988), and a leader in the promotion of Computer Chess worldwide. This is an information page on computer chess by and about Monty Newborn. http://www.wednesday-night.com/montynewborn.asp
Jonathan Schaeffer Wrote many important papers on parallel search techniques for computer chess. Author of PHOENIX (actually an 80's program). http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~jonathan/
	Chinook - The World's Best Checkers Program Jonathan Schaeffer's checkers program - with the attainable goal of solving the game of checkers. Will chess be solved next? http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/
	Let's Play Checkers Want to play Chinook online? You can! http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/play.php
Ken Thompson The author of BELLE, and first person to develop chess-specific hardware. Ken also pioneered and developed tablebases (i.e. perfect play) for a large number of endgames. http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/
	Ken, Unix, and Games by Dennis Ritchie An interesting article about Ken and his work on Computer Chess. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ken-games.html
	Ken Thompson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Ken's programming history with a nice picture of Ken. Ken was one of the creators of the Unix Operating System, developed the B programming language (a precursor to C), developed UTF-8 encoding, and lots more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson

8. Aspects of Programming Chess

Chess Programming by Francois Dominic Laramee A complete non-techinical six part series about programming computers to play chess. http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/chess1/
Game Theory - Computer Chess Notes by Dr A. N. Walker Many aspects of programming chess are described here very well. Included are alpha-beta pruning, iterative deepening, killers and history, transposition tables, quiescence, the horizon effect, null moves and other topics of interest. http://www.maths.nott.ac.uk/personal/anw/G13GT1/compch.html
Parallel Computing Works A extensive detail of the work done at the Caltech Concurrent Computation Program, Pasadena, California. http://www.npac.syr.edu/copywrite/pcw/BOOK.html
	Chapter 13.1 Computer Chess by Guy Robinson The Computer Chess section of the book. http://www.npac.syr.edu/copywrite/pcw/node341.html
Computer Chess Programming Links by Paul Verhelst A great page to start from if you want to delve into the programming of Computer Chess. http://chess.verhelst.org/about/
	Chess Program Sources Paul has this listing of available source code for chess programs. http://chess.verhelst.org/1997/03/09/sources/
Homeostatic Chess Player by Rick Wagner Chess can even be programmed now as a Java applet. Rick Wagner has an online playable game that uses such an applet, with description of some of the internals that make it tick. http://chess.captain.at/
Chessboard Component by Resplendence Software Projects Sp. For Delphi and C++ Builder. Provides a 2-Dimensional chessboard with a drag and drop interface that can keep track of a game and allows full customization of the bitmaps for the pieces, squares and border. Optionally the board is resizable at runtime. All common chess events are implemented (OnLegalMove, OnIllegalMove, OnCapture, OnCheck, OnMate, OnStaleMate, OnDraw etc.) The component includes the engine of Tom's Simple Chess Program and calculates using its own thread. Optionally it allows you to use your own custom engine instead as well. Just drop a Chessbrd component on a form and you are very close to a complete multithreaded chess application. A Delphi example project has been included to demonstrate the common features. http://www.resplendence.com/chessbrd
Chess Archive - Endgames by Ken Thompson Ken has made available a wonderfully elegant and easy to follow online representation of all the endgames that he has solved. http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/ken/chesseg.html
	Chess Endgames Use this link if Ken Thompson's link vanishes. This site also contains some other good information about chess endgames. http://chess.jaet.org/endings/
All About Tablebases by Chessbase Here is info about the history of endgame tablebases and how to generate them using the tbgen.exe program that comes with ChessBase. http://www.chessbase.com/support/support.asp?pid=105
Chess Tests by Valentin Albillo A comprehensive selection of quite difficult Chess Tests, intended to allow you to test your favorite chess program's abilities, or even your own abilities. Plus results of how various programs do against them. http://membres.lycos.fr/albillo/cmain.htm

9. Books Available on Computer Chess

Computer Chess Books by Louis Kessler My own listing of valuable reference works for those interested in Computer Chess. http://www.lkessler.com/ccbooks.shtml
Amazon.com Touted as the World's biggest bookstore, their online library of book information alone is worth the visit. They will attempt to track down hard-to-find and out-of-print books for you. Most computer chess books fall into this category. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=louiskessle00-20&path=subst/home/home.html
	Amazon.com - Query Results on Computer Chess A listing of several dozen books, with noted indications as to which ones are now hard to find. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search?search-type=ss&tag=louiskessle00-20&keyword=computer%20chess&mode=books
Chess Bibliography: Computer chess books by Valentin Albillo Reviews of some of the most popular Computer Chess Books - with images of their front covers. http://membres.lycos.fr/albillo/biblio01.htm

10. ***FREE*** Software for Chess Players

ChessBase Light A free special version of ChessBase game analysis software. Its only limit is 8000 games per database. http://www.chessbase.com/download/cblight/index.asp
Chess Programs and Utilities Here is a nice concise list of all sorts of chess-related programs you might be interested in. http://www.enpassant.dk/chess/softeng.htm

11. Other Great Chess and Computer Chess Sites

Chessbase News The site I like best for Chess and Computer Chess news from the makers of Chessbase. http://www.chessbase.com/
Chessgames.com An online Chess database and community - with kibitzing. Many computer games are included in their listings. A visually beautiful site. http://www.chessgames.com/
Steve Pribut's Chess Page Probably the best page for chess on the internet. http://www.drpribut.com/sports/chess.html
	rec.games.chess Frequently Asked Questions Steve maintains this authoritative file, and posts it every second month on the rec.games.chess newsgroup. http://www.drpribut.com/sports/chessfaq.html
La Mecca - Chess Encyclopedia Contains chess definitions, chess links, opening codes, an ELO calculator, and more. It's links are especially informative and beautifully set up. http://maskeret.com/mecca/index.shtml
ChessLab Search Do an online search through a database of millions of chess games, or set up a position and see if it is in the database. http://www.chesslab.com/PositionSearch.html
Jeff Mallet's Computer Chess Page Jeff has a great selection of categorized Computer Chess links. http://www.zillions-of-games.com/Jeff/cchess.html
Geometry.Net - Math Discover Books; Computer Chess A very nice selection of computer chess links with descriptions. http://www.geometry.net/math_discover/computer_chess.html
Usenet Newsgroup for Computer Chess This newsgroup has people primarily interested in chess computers you buy in the store, but recent computer/grandmaster matches have also been also a popular topic. http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.chess.computer?hl=en

Help! How Do I Use These Links?

1. I link to individual pages, not just to home pages of sites. My links will identify good pages that are buried deep in a site.
2. I have organized my links by site, and sub-site. This way you can see at a glance what a particular site has to offer.
3. I set up a "Contents" and have navigation hot-links to make it easier to get between sections.
4. I display the web addresses (also known as URLs). It is nice to know where you are going.
5. I give a brief description of what I think is generally useful on each page.

These are home pages of a web site or sub-site. Generally they act as a table-of-contents, containing mostly local links to the rest of the site.

Up-to-date information about current activities and events. These pages are changed quite often, so check them regularly.

These pages give instructions on how to go on in your information quest, where to look next, and increase your level of overall expertise.

A web page that is designed to help you find or do something. It may be an index, guide, or even an online program.

The pages most researchers get really excited about. This is real data that has been made available online.

Collections of files, not designed to be looked at online, but made for downloading (using FTP) to your own computer. May often contain useful software.

Pages with the best collections of links to the multitude of other web sites. If you want to, you can follow all these until the wee hours of the morning.

Finally, you may see the following codes:

• (x) - Link did not work last time I checked.
• (xx) - Link did not work last 2 times I checked.
• Three strikes and they are out. (If I cannot find where they moved to.)