There are some good sites on how to write a chess playing computer program. (Do a search with your favourite engine.) One example is Chess Programming

On and off over the years I have experimented with my chess playing program (Awesome). It is written in Borland C++ and was written entirely from scratch with many original approaches.

Awesome examines only a few moves compared with most chess engines, but sees quite deeply, thanks to good move ordering and other factors. In a one minute game, it is sometimes able to store every position examined in a game, in the hash table. It some ways it emulates the way a human player thinks. One of my aims is to make the search tree as small as possible (without losing any effectiveness).

The default hash table is under 128 meg. If you want a version with a 16Meg or 64 meg hash table, then email me.

With the help of Winboard and its author Tim Mann (who runs a group designed to assist those developing their own chess engine) it has run automated at the ICC (and sometimes Fics.) Download Winboard at Tim Mann's Chess Pages.

Download the Win32 (freeware) version (only useful if you have Winboard) here awesome167.zip 287K

The zip file includes awebook.txt, which is an opening library, and a dynamic link library CW3215.dll which is required for it to work.
If you email me any interesting games played with Awesome, whether it is against a person, itself or another engine, I will add a web page of Awesome games.

With the Winboard version you can play 2 engines against each other, and you have a better interface than the Dos version.

I am currently developing a Windows version of Awesome, which will have some features that Winboard hasn't got.