Welcome to my homepage. Don't expect flashy graphics and/or colors. I try to keep the layout of my pages clean and simple, for it's the contents that matter!
One of my main hobbies is (Computer) Chess and Articifial Intelligence. I did my M.Sc. at the Computer Science Department of the Universiteit Leiden in the Netherlands. During these studies I learned how to program in C, and I decided to test (and expand) my C knowledge by writing a chess program named Duck. The first version of Duck competed in the Dutch Computer Chess Championship in 1989, and ended last place with 0 points. Not a very good start. :-( However, talks with the chess programmers during the tournament, and articles in journals like the ICGA Journal (formerly known as the ICCA Journal) taught me many valuable lessons. I rewrote my program, and competed again in 1992. This time Duck ended 11th out of 22, with a 50% score. Just for fun (and because there were an odd number of participants) I competed with this same program (no adjustments made!) in 2000, and ended 14th out of 16, with 2½ points. Not bad for an 8-year-old program (or, as Cor van Wijgerden put it, "a program from the middle-ages").
After my M.Sc. in 1991, I started doing a Ph.D. at the Computer Science Department of the Universiteit Maastricht in the Netherlands under supervision of Jaap van den Herik. Initially, the subject was about automatic hyphenation. After 2½ years I switched to -of course- computer chess. I received my Ph.D. in 1998 for a thesis titled "Memory versus Search in Games".
Over the years I have collected many chess links. By making them available on the Internet I hope to justify the time spent on collecting them.
A short story in which chess plays a role amongst other important things in life. The story is written in Dutch and will be replaced periodically.