Any opinion about this book?: "All the Right Moves"

[pocopito]

Yes, on these (modern) days all the info you need is available on the internet, but occasionally I like to read some stuff on paper (vg, books related to program languages). So I did a search on the internet about computer chess and found this book, by Carl Ebeling:

http://www.amazon.com/All-Right-Moves-A ... 0262050358

Does anyone have an opinion about this book? Or about any other one related to the same topic?

Regards

E Diaz

[JuLieN]

Yes, on these (modern) days all the info you need is available on the internet, but occasionally I like to read some stuff on paper (vg, books related to program languages). So I did a search on the internet about computer chess and found this book, by Carl Ebeling:

http://www.amazon.com/All-Right-Moves-A ... 0262050358

Does anyone have an opinion about this book? Or about any other one related to the same topic?

Regards

E Diaz

I have it and it's a very good book. A must have for any chess engine programmer. IIRC it was written by one of Berliner's students.

[uaf]

Since I like to collect computer chess books, I think it's a good book to have for historical reasons. It's Carl Ebeling's Ph.D thesis. There is the description of the VLSI architecture used for HiTech's move generation and evaluation

[silentshark]

Yes, on these (modern) days all the info you need is available on the internet, but occasionally I like to read some stuff on paper (vg, books related to program languages). So I did a search on the internet about computer chess and found this book, by Carl Ebeling:

http://www.amazon.com/All-Right-Moves-A ... 0262050358

Does anyone have an opinion about this book? Or about any other one related to the same topic?

Regards

E Diaz

I have it somewhere, good if I recall right. Some interesting ideas around search and eval (although they are now old). I'd still recommend, though.

Cheers,
Tom

[bob]

Yes, on these (modern) days all the info you need is available on the internet, but occasionally I like to read some stuff on paper (vg, books related to program languages). So I did a search on the internet about computer chess and found this book, by Carl Ebeling:

http://www.amazon.com/All-Right-Moves-A ... 0262050358

Does anyone have an opinion about this book? Or about any other one related to the same topic?

Regards

E Diaz

Hardware. It is about the hitech move generator hardware he did for his Ph.D. dissertation. Basic idea is that for a single square, only 6 different pieces can stand there, and there are not that many potential moves. A queen has 27 moves at the most. His dissertation is about taking that idea into hardware to create the basis for the hitech chess machine. Can't imagine that being interesting today.

[pocopito]

Thanks for the answers.

Luckily "All the right moves" was available in a public library close to my place and could take it a look. As said in former comments, it's quite focused on the hardware aspect of chess programming related to the moves generation. It also talks about the general concepts of chess programming (evaluation, move ordering, etc) but in a way a bit too simplistic to me.

Somehow I've found some books by David Levy:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/How-Com ... 4871878012
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Compute ... 4871878043

The first can fit to what I'm looking for (I'll try to find a review somewhere), while the chess compendium seems to be a bit too much for me.

Needless to say that comments about these or other books or authors are welcome.

Regards

E Diaz

[melajara]

I think this kind of references is now superceded by the wonderful integrated wikis around, e.g. http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/ which by the way, is referencing this book in a booklist page

There are also all the academic papers more or less freely available from various universities or via conferences proceedings (e.g. through the Springer LNCS series).

And, summa summarum, there is the source code of top open source engines

[pocopito]

I think this kind of references is now superceded by the wonderful integrated wikis around, e.g. http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/ which by the way, is referencing this book in a booklist page

There are also all the academic papers more or less freely available from various universities or via conferences proceedings (e.g. through the Springer LNCS series).

And, summa summarum, there is the source code of top open source engines

It's funny: I was looking for books related to chess programming and I couldn't think of searching in http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com by myself. Thanks for the hint. Seems I suffer of chess blindness (not only on the bard ).

And sure, all the info related to chess engines is available on the web. The point of the post was to ask opinions about a book about this topic, something like a book of reference, because occasionally I'm just fed up of reading stuff on a display.

Regards

E Diaz

[melajara]

As for research papers, to avoid to suffer of an additional strain on the eyes (after the strain on the mind), I usually put them on my Kindle DX.

Soon enough we'll have the very eyes friendly E Ink technology available in color, see http://www.ectaco.com/jetBook_Color/

Cheers

[pocopito]

What can I say? http://catmacros.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/dowant.jpg

Cheers

E Diaz