Chris Whittington

Oxford Softworks & Chess System Tal 1982–2000

British chess and games programmer, publisher and entrepreneur, founded Oxford Softworks in Burford, Oxfordshire in the mid-1980s and spent two decades building chess engines — from SuperChess (1982) to the Complete Chess System and, above all, Chess System Tal, designed to play in the romantic, sacrificial style of World Champion Mikhail Tal. Oxford Softworks became a software development, licensing and publishing house specialising in strategy games — Bridge, Go, Shogi and others — and was sold to venture capitalists in May 2000; the chess engine never retired, and Chess System Tal lives on today as a modern neural-network (NNUE) engine.

Worcestershire Sauce 2000–2010

After the sale, Chris retired (sort of) to a riverside house near Pershore, Worcestershire and turned to other pursuits: vegetable patch, beekeeping, alpacas, sheep, pigs, cows and river boating, programming remaining a part-time pursuit including a neural-net Backgammon project and a stock-market analysis tool (these never work btw — there is no way a retail investor can get ahead of the market sufficiently to overcome trading friction). For a time he also served as Chairman of the Parish Council, handing over to the capable hands of Bob Annis in 2009.

France 2010–present

In 2010 was the move to a farmhouse in south-west France — bees, honey, vegetable patch, carpentry workshop, generally things rural — until there came AlphaZero and AlphaGo, the big shock from DeepMind that neural nets could do what was thought impossible: play chess above Grandmaster level. So, back to AI and machine learning — that was some catching up to do, discovering the strange thing called NNUE and, of course, what better way to learn than to do it oneself, or, as it turned out, twoselves.

Veteran Grandfathers of Computer Chess 2023–present

Thus was Chess System Tal NNUE, and the development partnership with veteran chess programmer Ed Schröder of Rebel fame, born. Chris worked on the engine code; Ed was responsible for the neural networks, and especially for the techniques that dramatically shape the engine's style of play — the story of those engines, Extreme and Absurd among them, is on the Chess System Tal page.

Nomad Adventurer — South-East Asia & the Caucasus 2025–present

Since 2025 Chris turned digital-nomad-adventurer, keeping the French farmhouse but much of the year now spent in South-East Asia and the Caucasus. With a couple of laptops and an internet connection, the new Chess System Tal 3 was built and released — alongside a self-taught neural backgammon engine.

• Chess engine design
• Evaluation & search
• NNUE neural networks
• C / C++
• Forward pruning
• Games publishing