Introduction

Spark is an engine for playing chess. Spark uses a new search algorithm, new evaluation heuristics and a different board structure (bitboards), and has now become stronger than my previous engine: Bright
 

Features

- Highly tactical search, good performance on tactical test suites
- Balanced evaluation, data mined from a database of 700,000 high quality games
- Runs on 64-bit Windows XP/Vista/7, Linux, Mac OSX and 32-bit Windows XP/Vista/7
- Supports up to 16 cpu cores
 

Requirements

1. A chess GUI, such as Arena, that supports the UCI protocol.
2. A computer with a fairly recent processor (that supports SSE2)
 

Installation

1. Use your favorite archiver (e.g. 7zip) to unpack the downloaded file.
2. Configure spark as a UCI engine in your chess GUI.
 

Downloads

By downloading any of the files below, you indicate your consent with the license terms.

frcperft.zip (February 14, 2011: for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, source code included)
Fischer Random Chess perft, counts the number of legal moves at a given search depth.

spark-1.0.zip (December 10, 2010: for win32+64, linux64, osx)
30 elo stronger than Spark 0.4, multi pv, UCI evaluation options

drdeeb-2010.zip (June 16, 2010: opening book by Wael Deeb, 6.5Mb)
To activate the book, edit spark.ini:
book.file=drdeeb-2010.bbk
(or rename drdeeb-2010.bbk to spark.bbk, replacing the default book)

spark-0.4.zip (May 23, 2010: for win32+64, linux64: 40 elo stronger, bug fixes)
spark-0.4-osx2.zip (June 14, 2010: for Mac OSX 10.5+, Intel 64-bit)

spark-0.3a (January 10, 2010: MP version and bug fixes)
Choose OS: Windows 32-bit, Windows 64-bit, Mac OSX 64-bit Linux 64-bit

spark-0.3.zip (October 18, 2009, first public version)