Zappa (chess)

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

Skill level and achievements

The tournament results by Zappa include a 17th place among 45 participants at 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 winner program Crafty and a first place among 44 participants in the CCT 7, 2005. under the WBEC Ridderkerk Edition 10 ( Winboard Chess Engine Competition) from April to August 2005 a large automated comparison tournament for chess programs, Zappa 1.0 finished second in the Premier Division, the highest performance group, the seventh of 24 programs. Here, each program played a total of four games against each other, so that the result of this tournament is usually considered to be very meaningful in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of each program. In the overall ranking WBEC Ridderkerk Zappa was on the edition 10 of the tournament as a new entrant at number 8

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

When CCT -8 in 2006, Zappa reached a shared second place among 38 channels, along with three other programs behind Rybka. In the same year, the program finished at the 14th World Championships in Turin in 2006 with 7.5 points from eleven games in fourth place. At the 15th World Cup in June 2007 in Amsterdam Zappa was charged with nine points from eleven games vice champion behind Rybka. In September of the same year, Zappa won in Mexico City a 10,000- dollar match against Rybka 5.5 to 4.5 points. The thinking time per game was 60 minutes plus 20 seconds per train. Both programs were running on identical hardware, each with eight processors.

Since the summer of 2006, Anthony cozzie has withdrawn from the programming of chess software, in order to concentrate on the completion of his doctoral thesis. It is not clear in what form the development of Zappa will continue.