Some tips on building a chess-playing “super-computer” from grandmaster John Nunn, who gives a few reasons as to why you might want to do this (besides the obvious one, that you’re really into chess):
Why not just buy a computer, you might ask? There are two reasons why I preferred the do-it-yourself route. The first is that the system I intended to build would be a bit special, and not an off-the-shelf product… The second reason is that I have invariably been disappointed with complete systems I have bought. My worst experience was relatively recent. I bought a complete system from a well-known UK company, and to begin with everything seemed OK. Indeed, if all you did was run Microsoft Office then you would probably never realise that there was any problem with the machine. But if you set Fritz to analyse a position for, say, 12 hours, then there was about a 50-50 chance that it would crash during this period. Obviously this is unacceptable.
