Beginner's section on Basic concepts of chess theory

[Richbell]

Hello everyone, i am new to this forum and i love it. I have always been fascinated with chess and programming. I wanted to write a chess engine myself and have been trying to gain knowledge on the basic concepts. Sure i have found so many wonderful sites.

But for a beginner like me, it would be great to have chess authors here explain basic concepts like move generator, Evaluation basics, search tree, minimax etc. I mean all the basic concepts for just a basic engine to work right.

I don't find any sites explaining the concepts in detail so that beginners like me can understand them in spite of my low IQ and a lot of passion

I feel this will help chess enthusiasts like me a lot and in turn the chess community. We can probably have a sticky column for beginner's concepts or in a seperate forum subdivision.

Please advice, thanks.

[mjlef]

Try Bruce Moreland's site:

http://www.seanet.com/~brucemo/topics/topics.htm

And this new chess programming wiki (still in progress):

http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/

The wiki also has links to pubic source chess programs so you can see how others have done things.

[hgm]

The wiki also has links to pubic source chess programs so you can see how others have done things.

It does not seem to have a link to micro-Max, which is the simplest public source program, with the most elaborate explanations on its algorithms! (34 webpages of explanation on ~100 lines of code!)

[Richbell]

Thank you so much. Very informative, guys.

[mjlef]

The wiki also has links to pubic source chess programs so you can see how others have done things.

It does not seem to have a link to micro-Max, which is the simplest public source program, with the most elaborate explanations on its algorithms! (34 webpages of explanation on ~100 lines of code!)

You are right, and I will fix that tonight! Thanks for reminding me.

[Robert Pope]

The wiki also has links to pubic source chess programs so you can see how others have done things.

It does not seem to have a link to micro-Max, which is the simplest public source program, with the most elaborate explanations on its algorithms! (34 webpages of explanation on ~100 lines of code!)

micro-Max definitely has super documentation pages (thanks, hgm!). But being micro makes it very difficult to read and work through it's logic in the actual code. For a teaching tool, I think we could benefit from "medium-Max", a micro-Max with real variable names, normal formatting, and loops that have standard logic instead of being super-compact.

I've been looking at micro-Max, trying to understand the qualities that make it as good as it is, for as simple as it is, but it is a real challenge to unravel the actual code in its compact state.

[mjlef]

The wiki also has links to pubic source chess programs so you can see how others have done things.

It does not seem to have a link to micro-Max, which is the simplest public source program, with the most elaborate explanations on its algorithms! (34 webpages of explanation on ~100 lines of code!)

micro-Max definitely has super documentation pages (thanks, hgm!). But being micro makes it very difficult to read and work through it's logic in the actual code. For a teaching tool, I think we could benefit from "medium-Max", a micro-Max with real variable names, normal formatting, and loops that have standard logic instead of being super-compact.

I've been looking at micro-Max, trying to understand the qualities that make it as good as it is, for as simple as it is, but it is a real challenge to unravel the actual code in its compact state.

It exists! Look here:

http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/maximax.txt

And I have a link on the chess programming wiki now. Just do not tell my boss I did it at work!

[Robert Pope]

So what should me other two wishes be, O genie?

[mjlef]

So what should me other two wishes be, O genie?

Well, I doubt we can find enough super models willing to to that!

[Richbell]

http://www.geocities.com/axchess/firstchess.html

You could add this resource to Wiki. Very simple source code for beginners.