On the web: how chess programs "think"

The computing power of modern PCs enables chess programs to beat nearly every human chess player. A good example is the famous match between the human world champion Kasparov and the machine Deep Blue (admittedly a bit more than your average PC). If you are one of the players who always gets beaten by his computer, then you might be interested in learning how computer programs actually decide their moves. Francois-Dominic Laramee wrote a series of articles that not only describes how chess programs work, but also published the code for a java chess engine that demonstrates the concepts described in the series. The series is well written and avoids programming jargon as much as possible and explains the basics as needed. It gives not only people without programming knowledge the opportunity to learn how chess programs "think" but also a good deal of information on the basics of writing a chess playing engine from scratch.