News

Project Dead
4/11/2006
I've decided to start a new chess engine with completely different board and move generation structures.

Alpha 22 release won't be for a while
4/11/2006
Work on Witz is stagnating becase of a lot of work load from college and other buisness. Nevertheless I will certainly work on it as time allows. Expect a release no later than 4 months.

Tournament Book 1.1 Released
3/26/2006
A much better opening book made from many top quality games. Much thanks to IM Gaston to provide the pgn file.

Huge bug in Alpha21
3/24/2006
I found a terrible mistake in the eval tuning. Witz goes for bad pawn structures because I have the piece square tables for bad pawns as positive scores instead of negative scores! I fixed this and re-upload a new A21 with a better config file.

Alpha21 Released
3/18/2006
A hurried release before spring break.

Slacking on Witz
2/26/2006
I have hardly had time to work on Witz, but I will try to be more active now. Except a release in 1-2 weeks.

Book Downloads
1/12/2006
Added a tournament book to the downloads page.

Alpha20 Released
1/10/2006
You can find Alpha 20 now on the downloads page!

Alpha20 Development
12/23/2005
Redirected effort for improvements in strength to improvements in features for Alpha20.

Alpha19 Released
12/4/2005
A lot of new features and a big increase in playing strength.

Alpha19 Soon
10/30/2005
Witz Alpha 19 should come out by Monday with a substantial improvement in playing strength.

Downloads

Alpha 21
Pawn evaluation, Kingsafety Scaling, and Killer Moves have been added to this version. I was not able to put in endgame knowledge before the release date so Witz might be a little weaker here than in middle game. The evaluation is not very well tuned, but it is possible to tune it with the configuration file.

Download Win32 Binary
Download Source (batch file for Linux Compilation available)
Tournament Book 1.1

All downloads for previous versions can be found at the sourceforge project page.

Chess Interfaces
You will need an interface to play with Witz. Screenshots of Witz under the following interfaces can be found here.

Arena
Arena is perfect for using chess engines and it has many excellent features. Witz is tested on this interface.

Winboard/Xboard
Here is the original Winboard interface. It has decent graphics, supports play on online servers, and can read and write from PGN files. This interface is favorite among many seasoned players.
Note: Setting up a chess engine on this interface is a bit more difficult than setting one up on most other interfaces.

Scotti's Winboard
Alessandro Scotti's enhancement to the original Winboard/Xboard. Witz is also tested under this interface.

ChessPad
This is a small interface for the Witz chess engine. It can also be used as a database manager and can read and write in PGN format.

An extended list of interfaces can be found here.