General Information
The Match
The 21-year old Dutch GM Erwin L' Ami (ELO 2594) will play against Zappa Reykjavik on Tuesday 6 and Wednesday 7 March 2007 in Maastricht, The Netherlands. The match is organized by the Chess Events Maastricht Foundation and the Institute for Knowledge and Agent Technology (IKAT) of the Maastricht University. The Grandmaster will use the classical tempo, but the chess engine plays rapid chess (thirty minutes of contemplation time). The games will be played in the Department of Computer Sciences of the Maastricht University, Minderbroedersberg 6a in Maastricht. You will also find daily reports and many pictures on the website.
The Player
The 21-year-old Grandmaster Erwin L 'Ami from Woerden was bitten by the chess bug at age 5, when his dad made the introduction and faithfully took him to the local chess club on a regular basis ever since. In 2005 L’Ami scored a strong 9/13 in the Corus GM C group, and he must have been quite motivated with his ‘upgrading’, because he was the best Dutch player in the B-group in 2006 and 2007. He is an appreciated member of the Dutch Olympic team. Erwin is very active playing online chess, and has high ratings in literally all the fast categories of time controls, especially in the nauseating 1 0 one!
The Program
Zappa, a.k.a Zap!Chess, is a chess engine written by Anthony Cozzie, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The program emphasizes sound search and a good use of multiple processors. Zappa scored an upset victory at the World Computer Chess Championship in August, 2005, in Reykjavík, Iceland. Zappa won with a score of 10.5 out of 11, and beat both Deep Junior and Shredder, programs that had won the championship many times. After a disappointing result at the world championship in Turin last year, Cozzie decided to retire from computer chess, but in 2007 he suddenly came back with an improved version of his engine, named Zappa Zanzibar.