By the way, there is a very interesting tournament going on currently -- TCEC, unofficial computer chess championship [1]. The main intrigue of the tournament is the fight between Stockfish and Komodo. Houdini, dominating engine in the last few years, already lost any chances to go into the superfinal -- two very strong challengers, Komodo and Stockfish, in the last few months were able to eat huge advantage of Houdi…
Do you know of a document explaining the most important ideas in these chess engines? I know about alphabeta search and the like, but I'm wondering what the secret sauces in the recent best chess engines are.
Here you go: http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/ It's an ultimate source about chess programming. Also, Stockfish code is short (several KLOC) and well commented.