I have played chess for many years now and have been writting my own chess engine for about the last seven years.My main reason for writting my own chess engine was to experiment with ideas on how to automatically train the evaluation function, which for several hundred features/prameters, can be very time consuming if not impossible. I learnt the hard way that writting you own engine from scratch is no mean task!, and looking back at the hundreds of man hours which have gone into it, I would strongly advise anyone else setting out to write there own engine to be aware of just how much time it will take to write one that is competative with other peoples.
NOTE: I hope to have a working link to it posted here soon, and may even consider releasing the source code after I finish fully porting it from Linux to Windows.
This page contains all my favorite chess and chess programming links, and I hope they will be of interest to you, whether you are interested in playing chess or writting chess engines. If you are looking for a good place to play chess online, then I highly recomend you play at FICS, which is 100% free, run for chess fanatics and written by chess fanatics! If you do decide to play there, be sure to send me as message: 'jukofyork', and i will be happy to give you a game anytime. If you want to keep your self up-to-date on current chess news, then I recomend the Chessbase site as a good place to start. Even though Chessbase's site is run to promote their own products (Chessbase and Frizt mainly), it still contains lots of interesting news for free.
General Chess Sites
This is a list of places where you can play chess for free, or read up on current chess news.
FICS - Free Internet Chess Server - Best place to play online chess against others for free. I play here as 'jukofyork', try command: 'finger jukofyork' to see my stats.
Internet Chess Club - Never actually played here, and not 100% sure if it costs you money to subscribe.
Chessbase - Good place for Chess News.
Chess4Us - Has a review on CT-ART 3.0 ("a site that deals with specific openings and defences").
Chess Programming Information
This is a list of places where you can find good information on writting your own chess programs.
Chess Programming notes at www.ics.uci.edu - Spring 1997 notes can be obtained here & Winter 1997 notes can be obtained here.
Computer Chess Programming notes from www.xs4all.nl - Has a godd collection of notes/links about chess programming.
MTD(f) chess search algorithm - "A Minimax Algorithm faster than NegaScout", even so my 'fine grained' evaluation function did not perform any better using MTD(f).
KnightCap is a chess program which uses Richard Sutton's TD(lambda) algorithm to modify its linear evaluation function based on the outcome of its games.
NeuroChess is another chess program which uses Richard Sutton's TD(0) algorithm to modify its evaluation function, which is a Artificial Neural Network, based on both the outcome of its own games and the outcome of thousands of expert level games used for training.
NOTE: See my page on Reinforced Learning for more links to information about the temporal differencing algorithm.
Downloadable Collections of Chess Games in PGN Format
This is a list of places where you can download large collections of chess games in PGN format for free.
Chess Games Links - Links to chessgames around the internet which you can download for free.
ChessliB - The Worlds Largest Chess Archive! - Good place to get large (free) collections of games in PGN format.
PGN Downloads - 45,000 PGN format games to download for free, all sorted by date.
FTP site that has a failylarge collection of games in PGN format to download for free - Not sure who the site's maintainer is.
University of Pittsburgh Chess Page - PGN format games to download for free.
Downloadable Endgame Tablebases
This is a list of places where you can download 3, 4, 5 and some 6 piece Endgame Tablebases for free.
FTP site that lets you download endgame tablebases for free - Provided by Bob Hyatt, creator of Crafty chess engine.
Last updated: 27/01/04