Rebel

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Rebel,
a chess program developed by Ed Schröder. After Ed's retirement from competitive computer chess in 2003, his latest commercial version, Rebel 12, supports the Chess Engine Communication Protocol and is market by Lokasoft, including their ChessPartner graphical user interface running under Windows. In 2004, Ed Schröder released the free ProDeo based on Rebel. The free Rebel - The Next Generation in March 2014, turned out to be an early April fool, a Stockfish version was running in the background passing information to ProDeo.

Contents

Rebel with NNUE

Rebel 14, released in January 2022 as UCI compliant open source engine under the GPL v3.0, is based on Fruit 2.1 by Fabien Letouzey and Growing Fruit improvements by Pawel Koziol, the Fruit evaluation replaced by an own NNUE implementation dubbed Benjamin 1.1 ¹, along with optimized NNUE inference code by Chris Whittington ². 'Rebel 14 is over 350 Elo stronger than the latest ProDeo 3.1 ³. Soon later, the further improved Rebel 14.1 was released, which came along with four different networks crated by Chris Whittington in the famous Chess System Tal style ⁴. In April 2022 followed Rebel 15 based on Toga ⁵. And in November 2022 Rebel 16 with a code base by Chris Whittington, Neural Network by Ed Schröder and Opening Book by Jeroen Noomen ⁶.

Screenshot

Rebel 12 ⁷

Photos & Games

WCCC 1986

WCCC 1986 showdown: Schaeffer, Nelson (shirt with drawing), Berliner, Ebeling, Schröder ⁸
Round 5, Rebel - Bebe ⁹

[Event "WCCC 1986"]
[Site "Cologne, Germany"]
[Date "1986.06.15"]
[Round "5"]
[White "Rebel"]
[Black "Bebe"]
[Result "0-1"]

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 e6 4.Nc3 exd5 5.cxd5 d6 6.e4 g6 7.Bf4 a6 8.Nf3 Bg4
9.Be2 Qb6 10.Qd2 Bg7 11.O-O O-O 12.h3 Bxf3 13.Bxf3 Nbd7 14.Rad1 Rfe8 15.b3
Ne5 16.Be2 Qb4 17.Qc2 Re7 18.Bg3 Rae8 19.Rfe1 g5 20.Rf1 Kh8 21.Rc1 h5 22.f4
gxf4 23.Rxf4 Ng6 24.Rf5 Nxe4 25.Nxe4 Qxe4 26.Qxe4 Rxe4 27.Bxh5 Ne7 28.Rxf7
Bd4+ 29.Kh1 Nxd5 30.Rxb7 Rd8 31.Bf3 Re3 32.Bh4 Nf6 33.Rf7 Re6 34.Bd5 Nxd5
35.Bxd8 Nb4 36.a3 Kg8 37.Rcf1 Nc2 38.Rf8+ Kg7 39.a4 d5 40.h4 Ne3 41.R1f7+ Kg6
42.Rc7 Nd1 43.Rg8+ Kf5 44.Rf7+ Ke4 45.g4 Kd3 46.h5 Re1+ 47.Kg2 Ne3+ 48.Kg3 Be5+
49.Kh4 Rh1+ 50.Kg5 Rg1 51.Kg6 Rxg4+ 52.Bg5 Rb4 53.Bxe3 Kxe3 54.Re8 Rg4+ 55.Kh7
Re4 56.Ra7 d4 57.Rxa6 d3 58.Rg6 d2 59.Rg1 Kf2 60.Reg8 Re1 61.R1g2+ Ke3 62.Rxd2
Kxd2 63.Rc8 Bd4 64.Rb8 Re6 65.Rb7 Kc2 66.b4 c4 67.b5 c3 68.Rd7 Kd3 69.b6 c2
70.b7 c1=Q 0-1

WCCC 1992

WCCC 1992: Richard Lang, Ossi Weiner, Jan Louwman, Ed Schröder, Rob Kemper ¹⁰
Round 4, Chess Genius - ChessMachine WK ¹¹

[Event "7th World Computer Chess Championship"]
[Site "Madrid, Spain"]
[Date "1992.11.26"]
[Round "4"]
[White "Chess Genius"]
[Black "ChessMachine WK"]
[Result "0-1"]

1.d4 Nf6 2.g3 e6 3.c4 d5 4.Bg2 Be7 5.Nf3 O-O 6.O-O dxc4 7.Qc2 a6 8.Qxc4 b5
9.Qc2 Bb7 10.Bd2 Be4 11.Qc1 Bb7 12.Rd1 Nc6 13.Bf4 Nd5 14.Bg5 f6 15.Bd2 Nb6
16.e3 Qe8 17.Qc2 Bd6 18.Nh4 Nc4 19.Bc3 g5 20.Nf3 b4 21.Be1 N4a5 22.Nbd2 g4
23.Nh4 f5 24.a3 Kh8 25.Nf1 Ne7 26.Bxb4 Bxb4 27.axb4 Nac6 28.Qc4 Qd7 29.b5 axb5
30.Qxb5 Rfb8 31.Rxa8 Bxa8 32.Qa4 Ne5 33.Qa7 N5c6 34.Qa3 Bb7 35.Rc1 Ra8 36.Qc5
Ra5 37.Qc4 Nd5 38.Nd2 Ncb4 39.Nb3 Ba6 40.Nc5 Bxc4 41.Nxd7 Ba6 42.Bxd5 Nxd5
43.Nc5 Bc8 44.Nd3 Ba6 45.Nf4 Nxf4 46.gxf4 Bb7 47.f3 gxf3 48.Rxc7 Be4 49.Rc8+
Kg7 50.Rb8 Ra1+ 51.Kf2 Rc1 52.Nxf3 Rc2+ 53.Kg3 Bd5 54.Rb6 h6 55.h4 Re2 56.Ne5 h5
57.e4 fxe4 58.f5 exf5 59.Rg6+ Kh7 60.Rg5 Be6 61.Rxh5+ Kg7 62.Rg5+ Kf6 63.b4 Re3+
64.Kf4 Rh3 65.Rg6+ Ke7 66.Rh6 e3 67.Nc6+ Kd7 68.Ne5+ Ke7 69.Ng6+ Kd8 70.Rh8+ Kc7
71.Re8 Kd6 72.Ra8 Bc4 73.Ne5 Bb5 74.Nf7+ Ke7 75.Nh6 Rxh4+ 76.Kg5 Rxh6 77.Kxh6 e2
78.Ra5 e1=Q 79.Rxb5 0-1

View this game on Lichess.org

Rebel vs Anand July 1998

Rebel vs Viswanathan Anand, Ischia, July 1998 ¹²

Associated People

Ed Schröder - Engine developer
Jan Louwman - early support and operator
Rob Kemper - developer of the MS-DOS graphical user interface
Jeroen Noomen - Book author
Lex Loep - Lokasoft continues Rebel 12 distribution, developer of the ChessPartner graphical user interface
Chris Whittington collaboration since Rebel 15 and CSTAL 2.00
Thorsten Czub Tester and Consultant

History

Rebel's development started in 1980 as a program written in Basic and running on a TRS-80 with a 1.77 MHz Z80 Processor, and was later rewritten in 6502 assembly to run on Apple II home-computers. Rebel's first tournament in 1982 was already a big success, becoming third at the 2nd Dutch Computer Championship, which was noticed by Jan Louwman, the pioneer of Dutch computer chess with commercial relations to Hegener & Glaser and other manufacturers of dedicated chess computers. With Jan's support, Rebel was commercially brought to market as Mephisto Rebell and about 20 subsequent dedicated models, sold in the period from 1985 until 1995 by Hegener & Glaser, Saitek and TASC ¹³ . At the dramatic Cologne WCCC 1986 showdown, Rebel, running on an Apple II, nearly became champion when it was almost winning from Bebe, but finally underestimated a dangerous passer and lost. Rebel on 6502 further played the ACM 1986 (Rebel Recom), the ACM 1989 and WCCC 1989, and won the First Computer Olympiad 1989.

The ARM2 RISC version of Rebel, developed in the early 90s, running on a TASC ISA card for an IBM PC, and called ChessMachine Gideon, won the WMCCC 1991 in Vancouver and the WCCC 1992 in Madrid ¹⁴ . Subsequent x86 PC-versions of Rebel run under MS-DOS with its own proprietary but sophisticated graphical user interface developed by Rob Kemper, while Jeroen Noomen was responsible for the opening book ¹⁵ .

How Rebel plays Chess

When Ed Schröder retired from competition in 2003, he made almost all his knowledge about the internals of Rebel public in his Programmer Corner summarized in How Rebel Plays Chess ¹⁶, elaborating on:

Descriptions

1989

from the WCCC 1989 booklet ¹⁷ :

The Mephisto Rebel has to be defined in between a Shannon A and a Shannon B type of chess program. To all brute force calculations a fixed ply depth quiescence search is added. Capturing moves and checks are extended more deeply. The evaluation function integrated much chess-knowledge, so the program also finds good positional moves.

1999

given from the ICGA-site ¹⁸ :

REBEL BV is a Dutch chess software developing company completely devoted to chess since 1985. In that remarkable year (1985) our first commercial chess program named REBEL 5.0 was released by Mephisto Hegener & Glaser, Munich, Germany in a stand-alone (dedicated) chess computer.

Since 1994 we produce top chess software for PC distributed by a worldwide dealer network in more than 30 countries.

What is Rebel?

Rebel is one of the strongest and most complete chess programs in the world.
Rebel is famous for its playing strength but especially for its deep positional understanding.
Therefore the quality of the returned analysis is simply high and mostly very reliable what makes Rebel not only play good against humans but also against other computer opponents.
Rebel is not a chess product with bells and whistles which you turn off once you have seen them, Rebel is for the serious and professional chess player who wants the best.
Rebel is known for being very user friendly, you hardly need the manual.
For first time users Rebel is easy to understand. Within Rebel 10.0 you can even choose three modes to operate Rebel (novice, intermediate and expert).
Rebel is famous for its build-in database with dazzling possibilities.
The latest version of Rebel is always released including a big opening book with the latest opening theory.
The Rebel 10.0 book contains more than (hand typed) 1,500,000 opening positions developed through a period of over 8 years.
Rebel has many analysis options to analyze your own (or grandmaster) games or favorite positions. Rebel will show you the places in games where mistakes are made.
Rebel also is known for many unique extra useful features not found in other chess software.
Rebel is not only a very complete chess program but also a complete chess product as we also sell additional DATA cdrom's with over 1 million chess games, a chess tree (and opening) book of more then 50 million unique positions (REBEL EOC), an opening book cdrom with more than 12 million opening moves (Rebel Gold), Rebel BONUS the data and utility cdrom.