Zappa, Zap!Chess or Zappa Mexico, is a
UCI chess engine
In computer chess, a chess engine is a computer program that analyzes chess or List of chess variants, chess variant positions, and generates a move or list of moves that it regards as strongest.
A chess software engine, engine is usually a Front ...
written by Anthony Cozzie, a graduate student at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...
. 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 Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...
) and the current version (Zappa Mexico) is available at
Shredder Computer Chess.
History
Zappa scored an upset victory at the
World Computer Chess Championship in August, 2005, in
Reykjavík
Reykjavík is the Capital city, capital and largest city in Iceland. It is located in southwestern Iceland on the southern shore of Faxaflói, the Faxaflói Bay. With a latitude of 64°08′ N, the city is List of northernmost items, the worl ...
,
Iceland
Iceland is a Nordic countries, Nordic island country between the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between North America and Europe. It is culturally and politically linked with Europe and is the regi ...
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 (ICC) and defeating
Grandmaster Jaan Ehlvest 3-1.
In Mexico in September 2007 Zappa won a match against
Rybka 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 for current rankings. Some speculate that Zappa's more efficient
SMP 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
Rybka before the latter's disqualification.
[ Rybka placed first but the program was found to have plagiarized Crafty and ]Fruit
In botany, a fruit is the seed-bearing structure in flowering plants (angiosperms) that is formed from the ovary after flowering.
Fruits are the means by which angiosperms disseminate their seeds. Edible fruits in particular have long propaga ...
(the GPL'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
Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
and
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
computers with up to 512 CPU cores and supports multipv analysis and Nalimov
tablebases.
Notable games
Zappa vs Crafty, WCCC 2005, 1-0Despite 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