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REBEL 11.0 review

by Jeff Lischer

Introduction

I have been a loyal Rebel user since Rebel 8, but am new to the Rebel Beta team this year. I apologize for my tardiness in submitting this review, but it did give me the opportunity to read the other reviews before starting mine. The reviews have been excellent and have given a very good idea of the many features of these programs so I won't repeat them all. Instead I will try to highlight just the features that are most important to me.

There are two things to keep in mind regarding my comments below. The first is that I am an intermediate level chess player, so I'm not able to judge the strength of these strong programs based on their play against me. I prefer to have the programs analyze GM games and interesting positions in an attempt to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

The second is that I have only limited experience with other chess software. I have experimented with a few of the free Winboard engines such as Crafty and Little Goliath, but I have not purchased any other commercial software. I use Rebel mostly for analysis and occasionally for playing against it. I've always felt Rebel was the most complete package for me and haven't felt the need for another package. Well, actually I have been tempted occasionally in the past, but with the release of Rebel 11, I think those temptations will be gone for quite a while….


Rebel Century 3

Testing this beta release was almost like playing with a final release - there were so few glitches found in the program. Although the improvements made in Century 3 were confined mostly to speed-up of the search algorithms, I was amazed by the results. Suddenly, Rebel was showing well against the top programs again, while maintaining its positional, human-like style.

The results in computer-computer games show a considerable improvement over the earlier Century 1.0 and 1.2, but the real test will be seeing how much the improved search helps in games versus humans. I am eagerly awaiting the continuation of Rebel Grandmaster Challenge series starting with the 6 game match versus the anti-computer expert van der Wiel.

Besides Century's positional style, one of my favorite aspects of Century is its easy-to-use and extremely flexible analysis features. There is no n-best option, but I actually prefer the approach of Century. I program buttons for Analysis, Analysis Include, and Analysis Exclude to be able to quickly switch between these different modes. 'Analysis' allows Century to analyze as it normally would, while the 'Include' option forces analysis of only my selected moves, and the 'Exclude' options does the reverse and forces analysis of all moves except those I select. With just a few clicks of the mouse and I can see what move Century prefers, then easily see its next best moves, and then finally see what it thinks about my suggested moves.

The Analyze Game feature is also very well set up. You can easily have Century analyze just white's moves, just black's, or both. Or you can set it up to just analyze certain selected moves. The program first analyzes its preferred move, then if that doesn't match the move actually played it goes on to analyze the actual move as well and outputs both analysis lines for comparison.

Century is also very enjoyable to play against - in some weakened setting such as a specific Elo rating or a weakened personality, of course!. The games always seem very real - there's a natural give and take to them as small to medium mistakes are made by both sides. Unlike some other weakened programs Century does not make obvious blunders, which just take all the tension out of a good game. I also dislike programs that you can only weaken by changing their average time or ply depth. They are usually still too strong and I find it highly irritating for my opponent to be constantly making instantaneous moves. By using the weakened Century settings I can play a nice 40/40 game in which there are healthy pauses as we both consider our moves.

Some people complain about the fact that Century is still a DOS program. In all honesty I often forget that it's DOS-based because it is so stable running under Windows. There is an occasional position that will make it crash when using Analysis Exclude (a pesky bug from earlier versions that hasn't been solved yet), but that really is the exception. You can Alt-Tab back into Windows, but Century's pondering will slow to a crawl when it's in the background like that.

I must confess, however, that I was eager to try out Chess Tiger and the Chess Partner GUI to see what Rebel's new home would look like.