Note that this is a 1997 paper, seemingly written before Kasparov's rematch and overall loss to Deep Blue. I imagine there have been more ideas that have become standard in the 20 years since, though machine learning still seems to not be used much.<p><i>Blatant self promotion</i> for anyone interested in this subject, I wrote up a series of blog posts about the evolution of Chess and Go AIs with some more detail and pretty pictures: <a href="http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/a-brief-history-of-game-ai/" rel="nofollow">http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/a-brief-history-of-gam...</a>