Zen (go program)
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 5d and 7d: Zen19, Zen19b, Zen19D, Zen19S, Zen19X 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 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. It also won the 2011 Olympiad in Tilburg. In 2012, Zen beat Takemiya Masaki once with a handicap of 5 stones (11 points) and once with 4 stones (20 points).
Zen was released commercially under the name Tencho no Igo Zenith Go on 18 September 2009. Version 2 release on August 27, 2010 and version 3 release on 30 September 2011. Version 4 release on 27 July 2012 and version 5 release on 13 December 2013.
Website for the software (Japanese) https://book.mynavi.jp/ec/products/detail/id=24205
For English language, version 4 is available.
http://www.dlmarket.jp/product_info.php/products_id/214024/language/en
See latest go software updates for current version information.
(See Zen for disambiguation])
In 2011, several different experiments of Zen started playing on KGS:
Name | Rating | Time | Hardware | KGS Archive | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Zen19N | 4D | 20 Minutes + 30 seconds Byo-Yomi | Mac Pro 8 cores, Xeon 2.26 GHz | ![]() | |
Zen19B | 5D | 15 seconds per move | Mac Pro 8 cores, Xeon 2.26 GHz | ![]() | |
Zen19D | 6D | 15 seconds per move | Mini-cluster of 6 PCs | ![]() | |
Zen19S | 5D | 20 Minutes + 30 seconds Byo-Yomi | Mini-cluster of 6 PCs | ![]() | |
Zen19 | 6D | 15 seconds per move | ![]() | ||
Zen19X | 7D | 15 seconds per move | ![]() |
Three versions active in 2016: Zen19, Zen19S, and Zen19X. Zen19 is the first program to enter GoKGS top 100 players, ranked 92 as of January 17, 2016. Zen19X is the first 7D bot in blitz game, ranking in top 50 GoKGS player.
Links