Zappa (chess)

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Zappa (Zap!Chess) is a chess engine written by Anthony Cozzie, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The program emphasizes sound search and a good use of multiple processors.

Zappa scored an upset victory at the World Computer Chess Championship in August, 2005, in Reykjavík, Iceland. Zappa won with a score of 10.5 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.

Earlier versions of Zappa are free (though not open-source software). The current version (Zappa Mexico) is available on shredderchess.com.

In Mexico in September 2007 Zappa won a match against Rybka by a score of 5.5 - 4.5. Zappa and Rybka are generally considered the two strongest commercially-available chess programs. 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.^[1]

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