Yes, this is definitely within the scope of a student project. Here are some links from my archive to get you started:
- This is a useful chess programming wiki.
- This is a simple introduction to chess programming.
- This is a more advanced introduction.
- This is a good analysis of MTD, a sophisticated search algorithm.
- This is a good guide to validation of move generation.
- This describes the basic architecture of a chess program.
- This is lots of good information on the Dark Thought chess program.
- These are more notes on chess programming.
- A reasonable introduction to rotated bitboards.
- A reasonable introduction to magic bitboards.
- Here is an old report from 2 students who wrote a chess program.
- Finally, here is Wikipedia's take on computer chess.
