As reported earlier during the 9th World Chess Computer Chess Championship (June '99) REBEL CENTURY played 3 blitz games against DEEP BLUE JUNIOR and won all three of them.

Much later (October 99) in private email the authors of Deep Blue and Rebel discussed the games in detail and came to the conslusion the 3 games in question are not representable for Deep Blue's playing strength as the Deep Blue Junior version that was available during the 9th World Chess Computer Chess Championship actually was a DEMO VERSION made by IBM and was not the real Deep Blue Junior.

Therefore Rebel Company decided to remove the 3 games from its server.

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The ball got rolling when the German Magazine Computer Schach und Spiele (15,000 readers, +/- 5000 subscriptions) reported:

In CSS 4/99 (p. 62) we reported, that the program Rebel played some inofficial blitz games versus Deep Blue Junior via the Internet during the computer world championship in Paderborn and "out-played the program, that calculates up to 20,000,000 positions per second, with 3:0" (see Rebel-Homepage). After that we received the following letter from the Deep Blue authors:

Feng-Hsiung Hsu and Murray Campbell, USA:

The Deep Blue version, Rebel played in Paderborn, is a special demo version build by IBM, to play hundred of customers in parallel through the Internet.

The program runs on a single chip, a thinking time of one second per move (including initialization and independently of the thinking time, set by the user interface), without permanent brain and using a primitive evaluation function.

The search depth is thereby limited to 5-6 plies, the extentions in the quiescence search is almost completely disabled. With this limitations, the program should loose to every 486 processor based program.

The ICCA has asked permission, to demonstrate Deep Blue Junior in Paderborn. We have made it explicitly clear, that it isn't allowed to play the program against other programs. Either ICCA has violated our conditions of usage, or Ed Schröder has misused this opportunity at will, to make false advertisement for his program.

Neither we have the time nor the energy, to react at Schröder's statement.

Rebel Company about the accusations:

We were not aware of any restriction that playing against Deep Blue Junior was forbidden. Deep Blue Junior was there and we took the opportunity to find out more about this program. The result was posted as NEWS no more no less and we don't have (nor had) any intention to include Rebel's victory over Deep Blue Junior in our advertisements.

We can't confirm the "one second" time control of Deep Blue Junior. Deep Blue Junior indeed played on a "one second" time control using its default time control but raising the time control caused Deep Blue Junior to think a lot longer (up to 10-15 seconds).

We consider it as a pity that all the playing strength restrictions weren't listed in the documentation that came with the program as we then certainly would not have touched the machine. The screen clearly showed "Deep Blue Junior" and made reference to the Kasparov - Deep Blue events.

Several key people of the ICCA have witnessed these games so we really don't understand the criticism. If the ICCA was told that no computer was allowed to play Deep Blue Junior then they should have told us so.

We like to emphasize that the German magazine Computer Schach und Spiele is known for its anti Rebel style and we feel truly sorry that respected people like Feng-Hsiung Hsu and Murray Campbell are now being victims as part of an ongoing anti Rebel campaign in Germany. The Computer Schach und Spiele people were present almost the whole WCC event and could have asked to avoid this kind of miss-information. They did not.

Rebel Company offers the Deep Blue team the opportunity to set things straight. We invite them to play a 6-game match on ICC in the "Monthly GM Challenge" style.

Ed Schröder
Author of Rebel

Some final remarks of interest

During the talks on programmer level it became clear the so called letter CSS mentions was nothing else than a private email forbidden to publish by law.

Co-programmer of Deep Blue Murray Campbell named in the CSS header wasn't even aware of the email Feng-Hsiung Hsu send to CSS. Feng-Hsiung Hsu further states the CSS article was based on false pretense.

Because of the nature of the games (they should have given more information on Deep Blue's playing strength) in combination with the new information Rebel's author honored the wish of his colleague and made sure the games were removed from the Rebel Home Page. The very same applies for the 3 blitz games CHESS-TIGER played against Deep Blue Junior.

After asking around it became clear the ICCA has not made any public statement that playing Deep Blue Junior was not allowed.