Ziggurat is the name of my chess engine which I have been working on since its first release as Windows Chess in the first Windows Entertainment Pack in 1989.  A group of Microsoft developers believed that, in order for Windows to succeed, a grassroots effort to create simple but fun entertainment titles needed to be made, and thus "Bogus Software" was born.  The byline for Bogus Software was that all of our applications could be "written in ten days plus a couple of two day follow-ups."  Read more about Bogus Software here.

 

 

Here you will find the current Ziggurat UCI chess engine available for download, as well as other chess programs and utilities of interest, information about Ziggurat development and upcoming events, and links to other interesting chess and chess programming sites.

 

 

Initially, Ziggurat was written to promote Windows as a platform, and so folks could have a decent graphical chess game to play.  The initial versions of Ziggurat were not particularly strong as they did not incorporate state-of-the-art chess intelligence in them; they contained basic alpha-beta search engines with none of the advances we find in modern chess engines such as Crafty, Stockfish and Houdini.

 

The present version of Ziggurat has been written from the ground up as an engine intended to be able to play a respectable game with better chess engines; my goal is to create an engine that plays with an ELO of 2500+ (approximately International Grandmaster level), and hopefully enter the engine in the 2011 World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC).  My underlying reasons for this effort can be found in the Nun Study.

 

 

Ziggurat is presently under active development, and new versions will be posted here on a regular basis.  Version 1.0 will be the one that gets entered in the WCCC.  I will not keep any older versions around until 1.0 is completed.  The current version(s) are beta, but play a very respectable game of chess.

 

Several people have asked for a 32-bit version.  I have added that to my to-do list, but will probably not get to it until the end of the year so I can focus on improving the strength of the engine for the WCCC tournament.

 

 

As of V.18, I will be converting Ziggurat to C#, so it will take a month or so before I have the next version done.  I am doing this to sharpen my skills in C#, make the development of parallel processing in the engine easier, more easily produce a 32 bit version for those who have asked for one, and facilitate the potential move of the engine to cloud computing.  I believe any potential loss in processing speed will be made up for by these benefits.  Until then, please enjoy this version, feel free to play with the tuning (let me know if you find any improvements), and if you find any particularly nasty bugs let me know and I will try to get them fixed.

 

Best regards,

Dave