Zen
    Keywords: Software
Zen is a strong Go engine by an individual Japanese programmer Yoji Ojima (cluster parallelism is added by Hideki Kato). On KGS several bots run engine maintaining ranks between 3d and 5d: Zen19, Zen19b?, Zen19D and Zen19n?. Zen was the first bot to hold a KGS 3d rating for more than 20 rated games in a row, and a blitz version seems to be holding a 5 dan ratings in 2011. It was also the first to hold a 2d and 1d rating for more than 20 games, respectively. Hardware used to run Zen19 on KGS: Mac Pro 8 core, Xeon 2.26GHz.
It won the 2009 Computer Olympiad in Pamplona, Spain, running on the slowest hardware among the competitors.
Zen was released commercially under the name Tencho no Igo Zenith Go on 18 September 2009. Website to the software (Japanese) http://soft.mycom.co.jp/pcigo/tencho2/index.html An english version will hopefully follow soon (written october 2009).
There seems to be a version 2 for sale at amazon jp
http://senseis.xmp.net/?Zen |