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ZCT, (Zach's Chess Test)
an open source chess engine by Zach Wegner, written in C, in development since June 1, 2005 and first released April 29, 2008 under the GNU GPL. The latest version is 0.3.2500. ZCT is both Chess Engine Communication Protocol and UCI compliant. As of the release of ZCT 0.3.2500 on June 1, 2009 ¹, the ZCT project is inactive.

Features

Main features are the use of bitboards, an efficient process based parallel search using DTS, and a crappy evaluation.

Board Representation

• Bitboards
• 8x8 Board
• Kogge-Stone Sliding Piece Attacks

Search

• Dynamic Tree Splitting
• Iterative Deepening
• Iterative Principal Variation Search
• Shared Hash Table
• Fail-Soft
• Selectivity
  • Check Extensions
  • Mate Threat Extensions
  • One Reply Extensions
  • Passed Pawn Extensions (7th Rank)
  • Late Move Reductions
  • Mate Distance Pruning
  • Null Move Pruning
  • Futility Pruning
  • Quiescence Search
• Move Ordering
  • Internal Iterative Deepening
  • Static Exchange Evaluation
  • Killer Heuristic
  • Countermove Heuristic
  • History Heuristic

Evaluation

• Evaluation Hash Table
• Tapered Eval
• Material
• Mobility
• King Safety
• Pawn Structure
  • Pawn Hash Table
  • Passed Pawns
• Tempo

Misc

• Automated Tuning
• Book Learning
• Perft

Tournament Play

ZCT played CCT10 and CCT11 tournaments, the ACCA 2008 and ACCA 2009 Annual ACCA Americas' Computer Chess Championships, and the WCRCC 2008 and WCRCC 2009 Annual ACCA World Computer Rapid Chess Championships.

Forum Posts

• ZCTACCAWCRCC by Zach Wegner, CCC, July 02, 2008
• ZCT 0.3.2500 released by Zach Wegner, CCC, June 02, 2009

External Links

Chess Engine

• ZCT's home page
• ZCT download | SourceForge.net

Misc

• Frank Zappa - Zomby Woof (1982), album Cheap Thrills (1998), YouTube Video

Watch on YouTube

References