Zap!Chess

Zap!Chess is the commercial version of Zappa, the 2005 World Computer Chess Champion. The CD contains two versions: "Paderborn" and "Reykjavik". Reyjavik is the version that won the World Championship; Paderborn includes some ideas from my work at Illinois. I myself do not know which one is better; you'll have to find that out for yourself.
The style of the program reflects my background as a computer engineer. Rather than developing clever search tricks that may or may not work, I concentrated on getting the most out of modern hardware. Zap!Chess contains one of the best parallel implementations in the world to run efficiently on multiple CPU systems, and it also uses 64-bit machines to their full potential. The program contains large amounts of chess knowledge, and like most modern programs it is tuned fairly aggressively - it knows where the opponent's king lives. This gives it an exciting style without being unsound. While the program is optimized for long time controls and big hardware, don't despair if you own a smaller system. Both versions come with an implementation of Singular Extensions, the famous Deep Blue search algorithm. They are disabled by default, but they increase the tactical strength of the program at the cost of positional strength.

Chess Tiger 15

Chess Tiger by Christoph Théron is the shooting star amongst chess programs. The rate at which its playing strength has increased in recent years is sensational. Already in 1999 and 2000 it chalked up a number of remarkable tournament victories. Then it became the serial winner of the Dutch computer chess championships, taking its last title there in December 2002. In 2001 Chess Tiger won the "Republica Argentina" grandmaster tournament in Buenos Aires, ahead of a number of top GMs, with an incredible 2788 rating performance. In the SSDF computer rating lists Chess Tiger is always in one of the top places. So it is hardly surprising that computer chess fans hold this program in the very highest esteem. Most of them consider Chess Tiger one of the top chess programs in the world. Chess Tiger 15.0 runs under the original Fritz interface. There are plenty of functions for beginners, club players and grandmasters: blitz and tournament chess, handicap levels, analysis. There is a competent chess coach for beginners, with complete move descriptions, warnings and real-time help during the game. In a special sparring level the program deliberately sets up tactical chances for you to exploit. It has many high-quality print functions, a beautiful 2D board and a state-of-the-art photo-realistic 3D board in elegant "glass" design. The program comes with a giant tournament-tested openings book and a database of 500,000 top games. It also includes free one-year access to the chess server Playchess.

Chessmaster®: Grandmaster Edition

Chessmaster®: Grandmaster Edition expands the scope of chess to include broader principles of learning. Josh Waitzkin's much-anticipated book The Art of Learning (Free Press) is designed to pave the road to successful long-term growth on and off the chessboard. The eight-time National Chess Champion and two-time martial arts World Champion puts users in his shoes in some of the most riveting and formative moments of his chess career, including the legendary climactic game from the book and film Searching for Bobby Fischer. Waitzkin then turns to the classics, introducing beginners to brilliant games from some of the most important players in the history of chess. In his most revealing commentary ever, Waitzkin not only teaches the beginning chess player the fundamentals of the game, but also humanizes the road to mastery. Never has chess been so exciting.

FEATURES:

Chess Tiger 2007

New version ! Using new search algoritms this version is at least 80 points stonger than the 2004 version. With Chess Tiger 2007 another jump forward is made, this version has a totally new search algorithm that makes the program 4 to 8 times faster at long time controls. This is where most of the strength improvement came from.
CT2007 is 80+ elo points stronger at blitz than CT2004 (on a fast computer), and much stronger at long time controls. We still do not know exactly how much stronger it is.

Ktulu 8.0

*** NEW *** Ktulu 8.0 is a strong engine with a interesting and active playing style. This version is estimated 50-100 point stronger than the previous verion. The engine is written by the jong talented Rahman Paidar from Iran. We expect more inprovements over time.

Includes the lastest ChessPartner GUI.

SmarThink 1.00

SmarThink 1.00 is another fine chess engine brought to you by Lokasoft. The SmarThink engine is written by the talented Sergei Markoff from Russia. The engine contains a lot of knowledge to guide the search, this give the program a aggressive attacking style. See further down for some samples.

The SmarThink engine is UCI compatible which makes it possible to use it in your favorite interface. The latest ChessPartner interface is also included.
For the lucky few who own a 64 bit system we have included two experimental 64 bit versions of the engine. One is optimized for AMD and one for Intel.

Rebel 12

This is the long awaited windows version of Ed Schröders Rebel program. Rebel 12 comes with the ChessPartner interface. The chess engine is programmed using the so called Winboard Protocol, this makes it possible to use the engine under other interfaces although it works best under the ChessPartner interface.

Rebel is one of the strongest and most complete chess programs in the world and absolute champion providing the maximum information on your screen, the visualization of the internal thinking process of the chess engine (Rebel's brain).