Zilch Chess Engine

Zilch was a private computer chess engine and the predecessor to Vapor and Tinman. It was my first stable chess engine. It was preceded by some prototypes I called Knightmare, but they were only experimental and very unstable.

Zilch was written from scratch and not based on Knightmare in any significant way. While I intended to release it eventually, it turned out to be vaporware – which inspired the name of its successor, the Vapor chess engine. Zilch ran on Linux and used the xboard protocol.