I am happy to announce Zahak 9.0. This release focuses most on making Zahak usable outside engine-to-engine matches. Good for analyzing, good for playing! Of course with lots of gained strength still. Now you can use Zahak to analyze the World-Chess Championship match between Carlsen and Nepo thanks to the support of …

I am happy to announce Zahak 8.0. This is probably one of the biggest releases of Zahak. With this comes +300 Elo increase in strength. The support for Syzygy EGTB and a new network architecture that is aware of the right-to-move. In between the versions of Zahak 7 and 8, Zahak got accepted in the OpenBench framework, …

I am happy to announce Zahak 7.0. It it is the first version of Zahak with NNUE, yup you read it right, NNUE. With the help of Aryan Parekh (the author of Bit-Genie), I wrote an NNUE trainer and produced a dataset of around 58 million chess positions using a tool that I wrote. All the chess positions were from …

In a very interesting match between Zahak and Nalwald 1.12, Zahak convincingly overcomes Nalwald to win the title. Nalwald scored the first win in the second game, only to lose in the fourth. After that a Zahak won a few games in a row just before Nalwald close the gap to only one game, after it reached four games. By …

I am happy to announce Zahak 6.0. It comes with parallel-search capabilities (via Lazy SMP). I also improved the search function, and evaluation function. I added many terms for evaluating and assessing endgames, I believe this makes Zahak a better endgame player. My estimate for this version is probably around 2800 …

The season two of the Super League has finished recently, and Zahak claimed the first spot convincingly. Zahak had a close matchup with Nalwald, who came the second. Loki, Lozza and CT800 all performed really well, they were competing for the third place until the very last rounds. At the end, Loki came ahead with …

I finally figured out how to embed chess games! Tune in for lots of interesting games in the future. Today I will show you two very beautiful games in ZaTour Super League - Season 2. In the 19th round, Zahak is playing white in a sharp Evans Gambit against Lozza 3. He sacrifices the queen in what looks like a boring …

When I first started working on Zahak, my goal was to get a solid understanding on chess programming and improve my chess skills. I have always wanted to make Zahak understand how to play beautiful chess. I believe I have somewhat achieved that, and currently Zahak produces one of the most eventful games. Of course, …

The Promotion League for ZaTour Season 2 has finished, with MinimalChess convincingly winning by a wide margin ahead of the rest: N Engine Rtng Pts Gm SB X Elo Perf Mi Ki Ru Za Fa 1 MinimalChess 0.4.9 0 124.5 160 8285.25 0 +1424 77.8 ········································ 1101111=11011111110=1110==0111111=1101=1 …

Zahak finally has a logo that well represents it. Zahak was an ancient villain living in what is now known as Iran. He had two giant snakes on his shoulders, and he had to feed them the brains of two young boys every day. The logo shows the two snakes, on the shoulders of a knight, the knight is looking mean, with a …