REBELLIOUS CHESS (9 january 2004)
You may have read the weblog of 2nd January about a low-priced Zire palmtop computer that I'd purchased. In the same weblog I described a few test games between Tiger and other chess programs.
Tiger is a commercial program. The two games that Tiger lost were both played against Queen, a freely available pc program.
Queen turned out to be far superior to the Tiger program. I can imagine that friends of Tiger will argue that the resources available on a desktop pc are much greater than Zire can offer. I fully agree with them.
But still, for those who wish to play a nice little game against a strong opponent on their pc, there are very good programs available on the Internet -- for free.
Another pc program that I tried is Rebel Decade .
This program is freeware! You can download it from several sites.
All the Rebel programs have been written by top-rated chess programmer Ed Schröder, who made this program available for free. The program is quite strong. Depending on the speed of your pc it has various Elo ratings of over 2000. I don't know whether this is a joke or so, but Ed Schröder claims the program plays about 200 Elo points stronger on Fridays.
One little problem: Rebel Decade does not co-operate with Windows XP. By the way, it's not the only problem with Windows XP: it is also quite unfriendly towards Java.
You may be interested to find out about the strength of this Rebel program. So here are three of the games it played against Tiger:
1. Rebel Decade - Tiger Chess
2. Tiger Chess - Rebel Decade
3. Rebel Decade - Tiger Chess
Well, in this mini-match, Tiger didn't even win one game. But you would be wrong to think Tiger is a weak program ...
