DISTANCE: Toward the Unification of Chess Knowledge 1

This article suggests a new approach to computer chess. A graph-theoretic representation of chess knowledge, uniformly based on a single mathematical abstraction, DISTANCE, is described. Most of the traditional forms of chess knowledge, it is shown, can be formalized in this new representation. In addition to comparing this approach to others, the article gives some experimental results and suggests how the new representation may be unified with existing approaches.