Continuing the About Chess top-level review of Chess Categories (see Articles & Resources to the left), we took a good, long look at our Computer Chess links. Computers have had such a profound impact on chess that this is one of the most difficult categories to sort out. We looked at hundreds of pages and tried to determine a few dozen that would be the most valuable to someone looking for an introduction to the subject.

First, there are a few sites that could be classified just as easily under another header.

• Computer Chess History is relevant to chess history. We created a new category pointing to the pages specializing in this topic (see the link box in the upper right corner of this article).
  
  
• Endgame Tablebases are relevant to endgame study. We created another new category to reuse under Improve Your Endgame.
  
  
• Links to commercial Software & Databases are relevant to choosing the most appropriate product and to determining a good supplier.

Second, there are sites where the chess play itself is complementary or even secondary to some other objective. It's well known that good chess software developers are not necessarily good chess players.

• Computer Chess Programming has as much to do with developing algorithms and with artificial intelligence as with playing a game of chess.
  
  
• Engines and Interfaces like Xboard and Winboard are as important to chess programmers as they are to hobbyists looking for a better way to play chess against a computer.

We left these sites under the general Computer Chess heading, but could easily decide to split them into separate topics in the future. It wouldn't surprise us if new categories of computer chess sites appear in the not-so-distant future.

Finally, there are sites that specialize in maintaining links to other computer chess resources. If you're looking for a specific topic, sites specializing in maintaining Computer Chess Links may be the most important online resource.

Our next article on external links will cover Products & Shopping. See you then! [All articles in this series can be found under Resource Reviews (see the link box again).]