An Explanation Tool for Chess Endgames Based on Rules

Abstract

Moves played by a chess program are often hard to comprehend by a human opponent and the “idea” the program “had in mind” when it chose that specific move is difficult to see chess programs usually do not provide any explanation of their moves. The rule method for endgames (Barth and Barth, 1991, 1992) uses a combination of expert knowledge with a modified version of α-β-search. The expert knowledge is expressed by rules such as can be easily understood by a human chess-player, therefore they can be used to give the chess-player a blow-by-blow explanation of the program’s decisions. In this paper, several methods for generating such explanations for endgame programs are described.