Originally posted by ae_jester
As far as I know, you really don't need to use trees with chess or checker programs.

Can you explain what you need it for?
Since you can have several possible moves and combinations (and future consequenes of a move) in a chess game, it helps if you have a tree.

If he went for a depth first traversal, that would be too large and consuming. I'd suggest a breadth-first traversal so that the program can go for only a certain number of future moves, and give the opposing player a chance to win.