I recently had a chance to test the latest release of Rebel Century. People that are unfamiliar with the Rebel product line should look at my previous review of Rebel 10, because Rebel Century is very similar, and I will not be going over many features that are present in Rebel 10 (just the differences).
Schroeder BV has said that this is the last DOS incarnation of Rebel that will be sold. All future versions of Rebel will be windows based, but it is unclear when these versions will be released. Originally, Rebel was to use the Chess Partner interface, however there was some controversy among users regarding this decision. So Schroeder BV listened to their customer base, and decided to delay the release of Rebel for windows until they had a version that would blow everyone away. My feeling about the Lokasoft GUI is that it is perfectly acceptable. I would recommend that you download the demo version if you are curious.
So now, we are presented with Rebel Century - a program that shares some of the features that were to be incorporated in the windows version, but without a windows user interface. Users of Rebel 10 are probably wondering what changes are present in this latest offering... Well, the most substantive change concerns the new engine personalities, with which you can change the character of Rebel's play. A number of pre-designed personalities are included in Rebel Century (Anand, Tal, Kasparov, etc.) Additional personalities are being made available on the Rebel home page for free download.
For a list of the different parameters that you can modify, I would suggest that you visit the Rebel home page. It goes without saying that you can modify all the standard things (like piece values and selectivity), and some more esoteric features as well. Personalities can have their own opening books, but they must be loaded manually. It would be nice if future versions of the program included the ability to specify an opening book in the personality definition.
The club player personality is especially interesting in that it is similar to the sparring mode in Fritz 5.32. When playing with this personality, Rebel will occasionally blunder away a piece or pawn. Squaring off against the club player is quite a bit of fun, especially when playing blitz. Rebel has succeeded in reproducing faithfully both human errors and time usage. This is something that no other program has been able to accomplish yet (Fritz 5.32 sparring games are untimed). I have always liked the Rebel handicapping features, which have really been tweaked and improved in this latest version.
The personalities feature also allows you to adjust the Rebel engine for increased performance. In fact, Schroeder BV is giving away a total of $2000 to people that can find the "best" personalities for play under a variety of different time controls (this includes both blitz and tournament). There is even a windows-based utility included on the CD for changing personality parameters (although you can do that through the Rebel Century interface also).
ELO handicapping has also been improved - Rebel automatically will reduce it's opening book depth for a selected ELO below 2200. I haven't quite been able to figure out how much the depth is lowered, since this is not stated in the program documentation.
There are a number of more minor changes in other parts of the program as well. One of the most welcome is a change in the ply depth of displayed variations (from 7 to 24 plys). To really use this feature, you need to set Century for moderate to long analysis times (say, at least two minutes on a moderately fast Pentium to get above 7 plies). This stands to reason since the engine has really not had enough time to examine the position deeply enough until it has been thinking awhile. If you use Chess Assistant, or another EPD analysis utility, you will find that the full variation (up to 24 plys) is exported when EPD analysis is performed by Rebel Century. Chess Assistant users should also note that you need to use the generic EPD profile, and not the Rebel 7/8/9 profiles when analyzing positions.
If you primarily use the program for analysis, the changes are somewhat minor, and you should mainly be asking yourself whether you want the increased ply depth. The only time this is truly useful though, is for when you are using longer analysis times, or if there are long forcing sequences in the game.
If you primarily use the program as a playing partner, then you will probably like having the new personalities to play with. For me at least, this is one of the major factors to be considered when purchasing a playing program. The manufacturers of Rebel have gone to some length to make fairly realistic "interpretations" of some very famous players. The included documentation on CDROM also gives some fairly detailed examples for modifying the personality parameters. This is in contrast to many other programs that allow you to modify personality parameters without explaining what they do.
Copy Protection
Must install from CDROM, but after that, CD is not needed.
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