Guid Matej. Learn and Master Progressive Chess

Ljubljana: Založba UL FRI, 2017. — 84 p. — ISBN: 978-961-6209-96-0.Progressive chess is an incredibly exciting game. This chess variant was particularly popular among Italian players in the last two decades of the previous century, but seems to be almost forgotten at the time of this writing. The aim of this book is to provide training materials that will enable interested readers to learn and master the game progressive chess.The author assumes basic knowledge of the game of chess. From the perspective of education, mastering progressive chess may lead to improved imagination and calculation skills. The game of progressive chess may also provide a challenging domain for chess composers.The preparation of the training materials used in this book would be hardly possible without the excellent computer program Progressive Chess created at the University of Ljubljana. The program is freely available online and is presented in detail in the following publication: Vito Janko and Matej Guid. "A Program for Progressive Chess." Theoretical Computer Science 644 (2016): 76-91.
The program was developed by Vito Janko as a part of his master’s degree thesis at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, for which he also received the faculty’s award for students.Developing a computer program for progressive chess is a very difficult task. The extremely large branching factor due to the combinatorial explosion of possibilities produced by having several moves per turn makes progressive chess a very rich environment for testing new algorithms and ideas. In particular, an efficient search for checkmates in progressive chess is a very interesting
challenge and may be both fun and an insightful part of any course on artificial intelligence.By developing a strong computer program and training materials, we hope to revive the interest in progressive chess among chess players. By the book and the computer program, the chess players may obtain a strong playing partner and an adequate analysis tool. Moreover, they will possess learning materials that will enable them to confront both the computer program and other
progressive chess players all over the world.We hope that you will find this book useful on your own way to become a master of progressive chess and have as much fun playing this game as we did in creating this book for you.