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Subject: Re: Beginning of an Era

Author: Fernando Villegas

Date: 16:38:33 10/30/98

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On October 30, 1998 at 16:11:55, Moritz Berger wrote:

>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


God lesson you.
Fernando



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