Zappa, Zap!Chess or Zappa Mexico, is a

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chess engine In computer chess, a chess engine is a computer program that analyzes chess or chess variant positions, and generates a move or list of moves that it regards as strongest. A chess engine is usually a back end with a command-line interface with ...

written by Anthony Cozzie, a graduate student at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Uni ...

. The program emphasizes sound search and a good use of multiple processors. Earlier versions of Zappa are free (though not

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Ope ...

) and the current version (Zappa Mexico) is available at Shredder Computer Chess.

History

Zappa scored an upset victory at the

World Computer Chess Championship World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) is an event held periodically since 1974 where computer chess engines compete against each other. The event is organized by the International Computer Games Association. It is often held in conjunction with ...

in August, 2005, in

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where it won with a score of 10 out of 11, and beat both Junior and Shredder, programs that had won the championship many times. In the speed chess portion of the tournament Zappa placed second, after Shredder. Zappa's other tournament successes include winning CCT7 on the

Internet Chess Club The Internet Chess Club (ICC) is a commercial Internet chess server devoted to the play and discussion of chess and chess variants. ICC had over 30,000 subscribing members in 2005.John Black, Martin Cochran, Martin Ryan Gardner"Lessons Learned ...

(ICC) and defeating Grandmaster

Jaan Ehlvest Jaan Ehlvest (born 14 October 1962) is an Estonian-American chess player. He was awarded the title Grandmaster by FIDE in 1987. Ehlvest was Estonian champion in 1986. Since 2006, he has represented the United States. He was named Estonian Athle ...

3-1. In Mexico in September 2007 Zappa won a match against

Rybka Rybka is a computer chess engine designed by International Master Vasik Rajlich. Around 2011, Rybka was one of the top-rated engines on chess engine rating lists and won many computer chess tournaments. After Rybka won four consecutive Worl ...

by a score of 5 - 4. Many commentators had predicted a slew of draws based on the strength of the engines, but the differences in style provided an interesting match with several decisive games and many fighting draws. For some time, Zappa was considered one of the two strongest commercially available chess programs; see engine rating lists like

CCRL Computer chess includes both hardware (dedicated computers) and software capable of playing chess. Computer chess provides opportunities for players to practice even in the absence of human opponents, and also provides opportunities for analy ...

for current rankings. Some speculate that Zappa's more efficient

SMP SMP may refer to: Organisations * Scale Model Products, 1950s, acquired by Aluminum Model Toys * School Mathematics Project, UK developer of mathematics textbooks * '' Sekolah Menengah Pertama'', "junior high school" in Indonesia * Shanghai Mun ...

parallel search could make it stronger on enough processors. In March 2008 Anthony Cozzie announced that "the Zappa project is 100% finished", which includes both tournaments and future releases. In June 2010, Zach Wegner announced that he had acquired the rights to maintain and improve the Zappa engine. The improved engine competed in the 2010 WCCC under the name ''Rondo'', achieving second place behind

before the latter's disqualification.

placed first but the program was found to have plagiarized

Crafty Crafty is a chess program written by UAB professor Dr. Robert Hyatt, with continual development and assistance from Michael Byrne, Tracy Riegle, and Peter Skinner. It is directly derived from Cray Blitz, winner of the 1983 and 1986 World Compute ...

and

Fruit In botany, a fruit is the seed-bearing structure in flowering plants that is formed from the ovary after flowering. Fruits are the means by which flowering plants (also known as angiosperms) disseminate their seeds. Edible fruits in partic ...

(the

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'ed runner-up in 2005), and was stripped of its title. ()

Commercialization

Immediately after the successful WCCC 2005, there were plans to commercialize Zappa, but the first attempts with Vincent Diepeveen failed. In April 2006, a commercial version dubbed ''Zap!Chess'' running under the Fritz GUI was released by ChessBase. The version of Zappa that won the Zappa-Rybka match, ''Zappa Mexico'', is sold by Shredder Computer Chess, is compatible with

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and

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computers with up to 512 CPU cores and supports multipv analysis and Nalimov tablebases.

Notable games

Zappa vs Crafty, WCCC 2005, 1-0
Despite Zappa being a relative newcomer, it managed to win the tournament and in general caused a bit of a stir in the computer chess community.

References

Sources

*"" *Newborn, Monty (2011)
''Beyond Deep Blue: Chess in the Stratosphere''
Springer. . Retrieved 26 October 2013.

External links

* *{{webarchive , url=https://web.archive.org/web/20051122182139/http://www.ru.is/wccc05/ , date=November 22, 2005 , title=13th World Computer Championship (WCCC2005)
Anthony Cozzie's Zappa pageJava Viewer of Zappa's games
Chess engines