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Rebel 9.0 new features
Playing strength
The new chess engine (which gained an ELO of 2619 at the latest AEGON tournament) is at least 30 ELO better based on our comp-comp results. Also you may expect another 20-50 ELO gain because we added a genius book learning system. Our first comp-comp results are looking very good using this new algorithm. We expect against humans the ELO improvement of the algorithm will be even more.
The maximum ply depth of the chess engine has been doubled from 30 to 60 plies which allows Rebel to look deeper than 15 moves and that is certainly needed because of todays super fast Pc's.
References
Other engine improvements
Rebel9 will contain 4 chess engines! The new Rebel9 engine but also the famous Rebel8 engine and the simulated engines of Rebel7 and Rebel Decade, simply select your wished engine from the pulldown menu. So when we will release Rebel9 you will buy yourself 4 chess programs!
Because we also added a build in AUTOPLAYER this allows you to play hundreds of automatic games between 2 selected engines. All played games will be of course saved in the database also the score of running matches is displayed on the screen.
The following picture will show you that every engine is fully flexible, you can customize every engine for playing style, selective search, combination, brute force, elo rating and even select different opening books (standard and user books!)
And last but not least you can fine tune your matches by using the standard Resign option at which score a game should be terminated, you can choose if you want to ignore double games or not and even customize the maximum number of moves (default=100) in a game (to avoid boring drawn endings of 160 moves for example)
New Book Features
Jeroen Noomen (our opening book specialist) did it again, after months of studying, all the latest opening theory will be in the standard book of Rebel9.
But there is more. You can now analyze any Rebel opening book by the engine! Rebel9 will analyze all positions in the book at your preferred time level and write the results back the opening book. After that you can view the results which may help you to decide to play the suggested book moves or not.
If you set Book Info = ON from the pulldown menu the suggested book moves looks as follows. The value after the suggested book moves is the Rebel score. The new Rebel9 standard book will be completely analysed on the PLY=6 or PLY=7 level to give you a good impression.
So if you own many Rebel books (Rebel Gold!) you can analyze all the books with Rebel9 and view the results afterwards. Analysis of opening books may take a long time since the books usually contains many positions. However you can always stop the analysis and continue later since Rebel9 will remember where you have stopped and continue the process from that point.
Also if you have made User opening books with the build in book editor you can convert these books with the RBMTOMVS.EXE utility (downloadable from our home page) and analyze your own books to check them for errors. If we have time left we will include the RBMTOMVS utility in Rebel9. Also the format of the opening book will remain unchanged so all your older opening books are still compatible.
Rebel9 will learn from it's mistakes, just as humans do Rebel9 will avoid openings where it loses too much and Rebel9 will try to repeat openings where Rebel9 scores good! We noticed that after many games Rebel9 builds it's own favorites opening book against you based on the history of all games played after installation, so be aware! If you dislike this you can either turn off the learning or reset the learning to default.
The new Database layout
We have changed the database environment completely. It's more user friendly and many new features are added. Also you can define the layout yourself now. The display of the games now is extended to a level where we think there won't be any wishes left!
You can customize the length of all items or even discard them and save your preferred layout as being standard. Customizable items are: name white, name black, score, place or tournament, date, number of moves, first moves of a game. Click here for a typical database layout example. Click here to view all customizable settings.
You can now very easily select a huge number of games with the mouse (Windows alike) and do whatever you please with the selected games: load, delete, export to PGN, export to a new database, add to an existing database. Click here for an example to select games.
New also is a delete double games option and besides searching a database on names, dates, scores, moves, positions and text the search is now extended to search on patterns and search on material too.
Searching on patterns is a very powerful and easy to use tool. If you for example want to study games of the "Stone Wall" just put black pawns on d6, e6 and f5 on the initiate empty board and search. After the search is finished select all games and load them. Rebel will load all games on the move number where the pattern as first match! (example 13.. f7-f5 or 17.. d6-d5 etc.) Also if you search for a specific game and only remember a part of the position just try Search on Pattern
Search on material is another powerful and easy to use tool. If you want to study rook endings with 4 pawns, just put a white rook and 4 white pawns on any square of the initiate empty board, do the same for black and search. After the search is finished select all games and load them. Rebel will load all games on the move number where the pattern as first match!
We have saved the best part for the last. Just take a look here and notice the 2 small boards. Board one shows you the chosen opening of the game complete with ECO code and full description.
Board two will show you the end position of the game AND Rebel's evaluation of that position all done automatically. You can customize the time level yourself from the database pulldown menu. As you see the new database environment is a perfect place to maintain your databases in the most easiest way possible.
Clicking on Game overview will show you the game in 15 small boards. Rebel from the end of the game to the start position will automatically start analyzing the game. By clicking on one of the 15 boards Rebel9 will start from that board. Click here for an example.
Minor improvements
The maximum PLY level is now adjustable till 60 ply (was 10) The same is done for the MATE level, you can now search up to mate in 30 moves. With Rebel9 there will be no more direct access to NiCBase games files anymore for reasons of space and lack of interest. In the Super Warroom the deepest ply of Rebel's thoughts is displayed.
Last update May 3,1997
Continuation July 2, 1997
The very best news is of course the REBEL 9.0 bonus cdrom you will get for free when
ordering Rebel 9.0. Click here for the contents of this
Super cdrom.
The new Rebel9 book is extended with 400,000 new positions in total now 1,250,000. A short compare concerning number of variations of the main changes done with Rebel 9.0 book overview:
| OPENING | REBEL 9.0 | Rebel 8.0 | Caro-Kann | 651 | 343 | French defence | 1364 | 511 | Nimzo-Indian defence | 659 | 291 | Pirc defence | 655 | 423 | Queen's Gambit | 3681 | 3017 | Queen's Indian defence | 425 | 240 | Ruy Lopez | 1512 | 950 | Sicilian defence | 6878 | 4356 |
| REBEL 9.0 | Rebel 8.0 | Book Lines | 23,601 | 16,227 | Moves | 188,299 | 135,108 | Positions | 1,245,416 | 871,404 | Average depth | 28 plies | 28 plies |
Playing strength
The results of the second test version (TV97.2) are very good sofar. TV97.2 is the fine tuning of the ideas behind TV97.1 resulting in a much faster search and increasing ply depth. For the moment we estimate that TV97.2 is 20 ELO points stronger than TV97.1 so we hope that the chess engine of Rebel 9.0 is at least 40-50 ELO points better than Rebel 8.0, this is without the expected ELO gain of the new book learner.
DatabaseSoon we hope to start the beta test of the Rebel 9.0 chess engine and report the results on our home page.
The database part has been improved with the possibility to analyze multiple games. Just select a number of games from the database and Rebel 9.0 will analyze them.
Also new with Rebel 9.0 is the possibility to create your own specific THEME opening books from databases in the most easiest way possible! Just enter the moves 1.e4 Nf6 and run this new feature and Rebel 9.0 will make an opening book for you of the Alekhine Defence. Do you want your own Sicilian opening book? Just enter the moves 1.e4 c5 and run this new exciting feature. All you need is a good database to extract your favorite opening books. We claim the 107,000 game database on our BONUS cdrom is a TOP database and is a very powerful base for this new feature.
On request of many Rebel8 users Rebel 9.0 also will directly load PGN games. So the restriction to convert a PGN collection first to the Rebel database is not longer needed as you now can access PGN collections in the same way as you can access games in normal Rebel database format.
Another useful request we have honored is to load and execute PGN and EPD files from the command line. Example: REBEL.EXE TEST.PGN will force Rebel 9.0 to load the game contents of the PGN file immediately.
REBEL 9.0 miscellaneous
Shuffle Book will force Rebel 9.0 to pick a random position from the opening book. The random book position can be either good, bad or equal for you. Your job to continue the game from this position!
Also very useful will be the Online Manual in English, German and Dutch. You can either read the whole manual or search for any specific text you want to know more about. Also this option allows you to read and search any other text file such as quickly view the contents of a PGN game etc. etc.
The hash table commands W, W1, W2, W3 and W4 are further extended to W5 (13 Mb) and W6 (28 Mb).
Last update July 2,1997
Continuation July 28, 1997
A few new and powerful last minute features are added to the upcoming Rebel 9.0.
Power Analysis has been extended with the Power Analysis Exclude option. While the Rebel8 'Power Analysis' function include moves you want to analyze, the new Power Analysis Exclude will exclude the moves of your choice from the move list.
This is especially handy if you are (for example) interested in the 'next best' moves of Rebel 9.0. By constantly excluding Rebel's best move you can watch Rebel's second, third, fourth etc. best move.
New in the online manual is to call help from any place in the pulldown menu. Just point with the mouse (or via the keyboard) to the pulldown item you want to know more about and Rebel 9.0 will jump into the right place of the online manual. Very convenient!
VERY user friendly is the new Define Buttons option. Rebel 9.0 comes with a lot more shortcuts (the ALT hot keys) than Rebel8. With Rebel 9.0 you will be able to define the 7 or the 11 hot buttons (below the big REBEL button) yourself with your own favorite (most used) program functions.
If you love Rebel's database part, just define the 7 buttons to 7 database functions. If you use Rebel mostly for playing chess games define the buttons to homonymous functions. If you are a book opening addict... etc.
On request Rebel 9.0 will show you the number of games in a database.
Games you delete from a database will be saved in a TRASH database. So in case you by accident removed a game (or games) you are still have the possibily to restore them. After you empty the TRASH, games will be removed for good.
New in the Game Overview is the possibility to quickly trace 'blunders' in a game. Clicking once on one of the 15 boards will give Rebel's view, clicking the second time will analyze the move really played in the game. The following example shows that Jan Timman better not should have played 20... Ne3? against the pre version of Rebel of 9.0 on the latest AEGON tournament!
Last update July 28,1997
Continuation July 31, 1997
The new Rebel 9.0 will come with a standard database of 62,000 games. The 62,000 games are a compilation of the years 1980 till 1990.
This will end the Rebel 9.0 development. The coming months will be completely used to beta test the new product intensive by a number of (already) selected beta testers by the Schroder BV and to release a bug free Rebel 9.0 in the middle or the end of September 1997.
After the success of Rebel 8.0 we believe that we again will manage to release a new super chess product that will please the chess world again taking into consideration:
A stronger chess engine.
Powerful book learning.
Lots of new features.
The BONUS cdrom.
Last update July 31,1997