ICGA Torneio

Gerardo Castano works as a medical doctor and writes computer chess programs as a hobby. Zeus 1.0 was written in basic and finished fifth out of seven in the first Spanish Computer Chess Championships in 1993. The program was rewritten in C in 1994 and uses the standard techniques of alpha-beta search, selective extensions, minimal PVS, transposition tables, killer heuristic, history heuristic, null-move pruning and quiescence search. Capturing moves, checks, promotions, mate threats are all considered in the search. Zeus 2.0 used 256KB hash tables and searched 3000 nodes per second. It won the second Spanish Computer Chess Championships in 1994 with a perfect score of 7/7. Zeus 3.0 uses massive hash tables (32MB), and contains extensive chess knowledge (pawn structure, strong squares, bad bishop etc). The opening book contains about 300,000 positions and recognizes move and color transpositions. The endgame database is being developed and the evaluation function, although large, has thus far produced good results...