Rebel (chess program)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rebel is a chess program by the Dutch programmer Ed Schröder . In 1992 it won the World Computer Chess Championship . In 2007 the further development of the program was temporarily stopped. At the beginning of 2016 a new version was released with Rebel13.

history

Ed Schröder began programming chess on a TRS-80 in 1980 . In 1982 he took part for the first time in a tournament, the Dutch Computer Chess Championship, and came in 3rd place. In 1984 he received an offer from the Munich chess computer manufacturer Hegener und Glaser and developed numerous models for this company between 1985 and 1995, which were very successful commercially, with a total of over 350,000 copies sold. The chess program was developed on an Apple IIe , saved on EPROMs and could then be installed in various devices. In 1986 Rebel was close to winning the title at the World Computer Chess Championship in Cologne , but lost an advantageous final against Cray Blitz and was only fifth. In 1991 Schröder switched to a RISC architecture and was able to win the computer chess world championship in Madrid in front of several mainframes in 1992 with the version of Rebel, now called the Chess Machine . As a result, the program received its own GUI and was sold on diskette under the name Mephisto Gideon . Schröder stuck to the MS-DOS operating system for a long time and gradually lost touch with the world's best. At the beginning of 2002 he sold his program to the Dutch company Lokasoft , which launched Rebel 12, a Winboard-compatible version for the first time , in 2003 . Schröder ended his career as a chess programmer in 2006 and made a UCI-compatible version of Rebel available as freeware under the name Pro Deo (last version 1.6 from October 2007) . In November 2007 version 1.1 of this program, tested on an AMD Athlon MP with 1200 MHz, was listed in the ranking of the Swedish computer chess organization SSDF with an Elo rating of 2706.

Successes against human players

Rebel played several competitions against human grandmasters . In June 1997 the program won with 10.5–6.5 against Artur Jussupow , in July 1998 with 5–3 against Viswanathan Anand , in January 2001 with 3.5–2.5 against the well-known computer specialist John van der Wiel . In February 2002 a match against the strongest Dutch player, Loek van Wely , ended in a draw 2-2. Rebel won the third game of this competition convincingly, Ed Schröder described it as one of the best performances in his program.

Rebel - Van Wely, Maastricht 2002

1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nd2 Nc6 4. Ngf3 Nf6 5. e5 Nd7 6. Nb3 Be7 7. Bb5 Scb8 8. 0–0 b6 9. De2 a5 10. Be3 Ba6 11. a4 c6 12. Bxa6 Nxa6 13. Rfc1! 0–0 14. c4 dxc4 15. Rxc4 Ndb8 16. Nbd2! Nb4 17. Ne4 N8a6 18. Nfd2! Nc7 19.Qg4 Kh8 20.Ra3! Nbd5 21. Bg5! f6 22. exf6 gxf6 23. Rh3! Qe8 24. Qh4 Rf7 25. Bh6 b5 26. axb5 cxb5 27. Rc1 a4 28. Rg3! a3 29.bxa3 Rxa3 30.Nf3! b4 31. Qh5! Rxf3 32. gxf3 Bf8 33. Kh1! Re7 34. Rcg1 1-0

Web links