Author: Moritz Berger
Date: 13:11:55 10/30/98
Go up one level in this thread
Hi Fernando, I'm also worried about recent developments about the commercial future of chess programmers and resellers. But I think that a true crisis would only be on the horizon if Ed & Co. did run out of new ideas that justified spending money on ever new versions of their products (I think that even $100 is not too much to ask for a program of Rebel's virtues, for $60 it's a steal, that's very close to the $50 you have to pay e.g. for ChessMaster or ChessSystemTal here in Germany). Fortunately, the end of this road of convincing new features is not in sight by far. Some examples: Rebel 10 has several HUGE improvements over previous versions and also some "industry firsts": 1) EOC - chess tree used not only for reference (in a particularly attractive way, including reference to 60 "all time best" GMs who played certain variants) but also in addition to hand crafted opening book as a bonus & penalty guide for the engine to chose the right moves from GM theory. 2) Anti-GM option, user selectable degree of "Anti-GM"-ness, interesting idea, Anand-proven, works also in many other types of !! GM positions from my databases. 3) Screen layout presets via F1-F5 to manage information overflow - similar to CST, sounds simple, works great. 4) Automated test suite processing with many new parameters (extended EPD). 5) about 20 chess annotation symbols (sadly missing from previous Rebel versions). 6) several times faster analysis in analysis mode by using specialized algorithms - good for overnight analysis and test suites 7) Finally - Resizable chess board (also at 125% of the size you had in R9), resizable, moveable, configurable information windows (focus on the important things, forget the rest), together with 3) a real usability improvement. 8) Annotation on-the-fly during the game if you make a mistake (evaluation swing), you see an asterisk * beneath your questionable move and can jump back immediately after finishing (losing) the game. 9) Vastly extended database search (on dates, free index, ...) 10) Fischer clock increment (important at Blitz !!!), user definable 40/x minutes time control etc. etc. etc. And there are even some things left for Rebel 11: a) variants b) Windows NT compatibility c) autoplayer support d) endgame tablebases e) chess coach like in Genius, Fritz, ... or preferrably even something better f) logfile like in Crafty g) ICC support So I don't worry about innovation for the next couple of years ... Moritz
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.