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Rebel vs Anand using anti-GM software
From July 21 till July 23,1998 REBEL in Italy on the island Ischia will
play 8 games against World's SECOND BEST chess player VISHY ANAND.
After the two Deep Blue - Garry Kasparov matches, this year we will have a new challenge. In 3 days a well known computer chess program called REBEL will compete with Viswanathan (Vishy) Anand on the highest level.
The most exciting question is if a normal commercial available chess program running on a normal PC is able to compete with the human chess TOP. Deep Blue (especially in the last match) has proven it is able to compete.
Deep Blue from IBM last year with super fast and special designed hardware hitting 200,000,000 nodes per second (NPS) beat Garry Kasparov with 3½-2½. The main question will be if Rebel on a normal available PC hitting 200,000 NPS will be able to set another milestone in chess.
Used software by Rebel
SPECIAL software used for this match
Especially for this match intelligent (experimental) software has been written in order to play as strong as possible against Vishy Anand.
From experience we know that Rebel does very well against strong human chess players. A compilation of the famous AEGON Man versus Machine tournaments clearly shows Rebel trough the years on TOP above all other available chess programs.
TOP 12 FOR THE MAIN-COMPUTER PROGRAMS
1991-1997
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1. Rebel +21 = 8 - 7 25/36 = 69.4%
2. Chess Genius +15 = 9 - 6 19½/30 = 65.0%
3. Chessica (Fritz) + 9 = 5 - 4 11½/18 = 63.8%
4. Hiarcs +16 = 6 - 8 19/30 = 63.3%
5. The King (Chessmaster) +22 =14 -12 29/48 = 60.4%
6. M-Chess Pro +26 = 5 -17 28½/48 = 59.3%
7. Chessmaster (The King) + 8 = 5 - 5 10½/18 = 58.3%
8. Virtual Chess + 9 = 3 - 6 10½/18 = 58.3%
9. Fritz +14 =13 - 9 20½/36 = 56.9%
10. Quest (Fritz) +15 =11 -10 20½/36 = 56.9%
11. Kallisto +17 = 6 -13 20/36 = 55.5%
12. Nimzo +12 = 6 -12 15/30 = 50.0%
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Although Rebel 9.0 did very well at last Aegon 1997 scoring 4½ points in 6 games against
2 Grand Masters (GM) and 4 International Masters (IM) good for an incredible TPR of 2619
ELO points it's our understanding that you can not compare the AEGON Man vs Machine
tournament and its results now facing a chess player like Vishy Anand as we believe there
is a world of difference between the absolute world chess top players like Gary Kasparov
and Vishy Anand and the average elo of 2400 of human chess players at the Aegon tournaments.
Therefore Rebel will play with special experimental settings which we also will include in the upcoming Rebel 10.0. This special software is called ANTI GRANDMASTER PLAY.
What is this ANTI GRANDMASTER PLAY?
The anti-GM software serves multiple purposes. Since we expect Vishy Anand will prepare on Rebel 9.0 (this due Rebel 9.0 is general available which we estimate as a huge disadvantage for this match) the anti-GM software will try to play a much different style of chess than Rebel 9.0, this without the loss of playing strength.
Next the anti-GM experiment will try to provoke strong grandmasters like Vishy Anand to enter types of positions which are good for computers, in other words Rebel will try to create positions where it will play on its best (positions Rebel usually is very accurate) and avoid positions which we consider as a disadvantage for Rebel.
The last months a lot of development time has been spent on this anti-GM option. The opinion about this experimental anti-GM software has been asked on several people who returned satisfying answers.
As a checksum we played hundreds of games with the anti-GM software against other chess programs as it was our understanding that the anti-GM software should not decrease the Rebel scores against other chess programs with more than 5%.
To our own surprise the opposite is true. The anti-GM option scores better! We now strongly consider to set the anti-GM option as default setting in the upcoming Rebel 10.0. A surprising development.
For an example how Rebel 10.0 might play check the Rebel 10.0 Diary.
All in all, Rebel now is ready to face world's second player Vishy Anand.