Revel Century

1999

We refer to the documentation on the old Rebel website of the 90's for all the new stuff and only highlight 2 things here.


One of the main efforts made was to make the chess engine fully flexible for tuning either for improving the engine or creating different playing styles (aggressive, passive, blundering or just fun styles, anything goes) which we baptized as a PERSONALITY. With the build-in editor the user could create his own personalities or exchange them with friends on the Internet as a personality is just a text file.


Left: the Personality Editor in Rebel Century.


Right: the Personality Editor with the external EDP2DIAG (Windows) program by Manfred Rosenboom.


Click on the pictures to enlarge.

The Deep Blue intrigue


During the 9th World Chess Computer Chess Championship (June '99) held in the university of Paderborn, Germany Rebel played 3 blitz games against DEEP BLUE JUNIOR (DBJ) and won all three of them. DBJ was installed in the big hall of the university and via an Internet connection and people could play against the promotional IBM monster that was victorious in 1997 over Gary Kasparov.


None of the assembled (world top) chess programmers really cared about the machine, we all knew it was just a matter of time beginning with the world top programmers who (as first ones) would surpass the IBM Multi-million dollar hardware on an average PC followed by many others. Anno 2015 the current world top (Stockfish, Komodo etc.) will take the Kasparov victor for breakfast on your mobile cellphone.


During the spare time of 2 rounds we took the opportunity to test DBJ to see how strong it really was. 6 games were played, Christophe Theron operated his Chess Tiger on a simple laptop of 166Mhz and got 3 draws. Ed Schrôder on his laptop of 333Mhz even got 3 wins with Rebel Century.


Then 4 months later all hell broke lose, in the computer magazine Computer Schach und Spiele appeared a (kind of) official statement from the IBM Deep Blue team (Feng-Hsiung Hsu and Murray Campbell) responded to the 6 played games with contradictive statements as the machine was advertised in the hall of the university as many people have witnessed who followed the 6 games, including ICCA officials.


In private email with Feng-Hsiung Hsu the Rebel author ended the bickering out of respect for the achievements of his  colleague and honored his wish to remove the 6 games from the Rebel server.


Download Rebel Century and install it under D-Fend Reloaded, a Windows environment to run old DOS games smoothly and user friendly.

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