Zappa (chess program)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Zappa is a chess program developed by the American Anthony Cozzie since around 2001 , which won the world championship in computer chess in 2005. Version 1.1, which is no longer current, is available free of charge as freeware on the Internet, but the source code of the program written in C ++ is not open. Commercial versions are sold under the name Zap! Chess by ChessBase and as Zappa Mexico (II) by Stefan Meyer-Kahlen . Zappa acts as a so-called chess engine , which means that different user interfaces can be used to play. It supports both the XBoard and the UCI protocol and can therefore be used with all known user interfaces.

Skill level and achievements

The tournament results of Zappa include a 17th place among 45 participants in the 5th Computer Chess Tournament of the Internet Chess Club 2003 (CCT-5), a third place among 54 participants in the CCT-6 2004 with the same number of points as the Crafty and a winning program first place among 44 participants at the CCT-7 2005. As part of the WBEC Ridderkerk Edition 10 (Winboard Chess Engine Competition) from April to August 2005, a large automated comparison tournament for chess programs, Zappa took 1.0 in the Premier Division, the highest performance group, the seventh place out of 24 programs. Each program played a total of four games against each other, so that the result of this tournament is usually viewed as very meaningful with regard to the strengths and weaknesses of the individual programs. In the overall ranking of the WBEC Ridderkerk, Zappa was ranked 8th as a newcomer after Edition 10 of the tournament.

At the 13th World Computer Chess Championship in Reykjavík in 2005 , the new version 2.0 of Zappa surprisingly won the tournament with ten wins and one draw and with a two-point lead one round before the end of the tournament. Both the point yield of 95.4 percent from all games and the lead over the second-placed program were the highest values ​​ever achieved by a program in the history of the World Cup. Zappa won his games against the highly favored commercial programs Shredder and Deep Junior , which had won the title among themselves over the past nine years. In the only game that Zappa couldn't win, it only scored a draw against the last-placed Futé program , the only half point from the entire tournament for Futé. In the parallel blitz chess tournament , Zappa took second place behind Shredder.

At the CCT-8 in 2006, Zappa, along with three other programs , took second place among 38 programs behind Rybka . In the same year, the program took fourth place at the 14th World Cup in Turin in 2006 with 7.5 points from eleven games. At the 15th World Cup in Amsterdam in June 2007 , Zappa was runner-up behind Rybka with nine points from eleven games. In September of the same year, Zappa won a US $ 10,000 match in Mexico City against Rybka with 5.5 to 4.5 points. The thinking time per game was 60 minutes plus 20 seconds per move. Both programs ran on identical hardware with eight processors each.

Since summer 2006, Anthony Cozzie has withdrawn from programming chess software to concentrate on completing his doctoral thesis . It is unclear in what form the development of Zappa will be continued.

Web links