Junior (chess)

Junior is a computer chess program that is written by the Israeli programmers Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky. They are supported by Grandmaster Boris Alterman, who is responsible in particular for the opening book. The multi-processor version of the program is called Deep Junior. End of 2009, a version of the engine appeared under the name "Junior 2010 UCI " along with the preview version of a chess own interface called Bobby Junior. Version 12 supports up to 40 processors, released in October 2010. V13 was released in early 2012. Currently, the " Yokohama" called version 14, which is on the market since early 2014.

Junior won the World Computer Chess Championships in 1997, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2011 and 2013, which were organized by the International Computer Games Association.

Reached in 2003 a program version of Deep Junior a draw ( 3-3 ) in a match against Garry Kasparov. 2006 won the program in Turin in the computer chess world championship without losing a game. In June 2007, it went from a comparison against Deep Fritz 4-2 ( 2 -0 = 4) emerged victorious, whereby it but with a 16-processor system had against an 8- processor system, a hardware advantage.

The program is optimized for multi-processor systems, and there comes to 25 million calculated positions per second. Characteristic of Junior is a dynamic style of play. Especially in tactical positions marked with an unequal distribution of material, the program is considered very strong. In the ranking of the Swedish Chess Computer Association SSDF Deep Junior is 10.1 with an Elo rating of 2982 by 250 points behind the leader (Intel Q6600, 646 evaluated games).

The program will be marketed to the engine version 10 with a Fritz user interface of the company ChessBase, the Engine " 2010 UCI Junior " with " Bobby Junior" user interface is available from the Internet Chess Club. Since early 2010, the official engine versions are sold on the HIARCS site by Mark Uniacke from version 11.