Gideon

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Gideon and His Three Hundred [1]

Gideon,
a Rebel based series of chess programs developed by Ed Schröder and marketed by TASC and Hegener & Glaser in conjunction with plug-in cards as well as dedicated chess computer modules based on ARM2 RISC processors. The native PC program Mephisto Gideon was developed in cooperation with Hegener & Glaser, and later marketed by Ossi Weiner and various other companies and dealer.

The World Microcomputer Champion and World Champion titles from 1991 and 1992 look a bit ambiguous, since they are not only dedicated to Gideon or the 1992 entry ChessMachine (with a Gideon program), advertised by TASC for the ChessMachine and Hegener & Glaser for the Mephisto RISC modules, but from Ed's perspective also to Rebel itself [2] .

RISC

Gideon was the name of the first ARM2 RISC version of Rebel, running on a TASC ISA card for an IBM PC. It became third at the WMCCC 1990 in Lyon, and World Microcomputer Champion at the WMCCC 1991 in Vancouver [3] . The further improved Gideon 3.1/32 MHz ChessMachine became World Champion at the WCCC 1992 in Madrid. RISC Gideon was further marketed as PC plug-in ChessMachine by TASC in bundle with The King program by Johan de Koning [4] , and as dedicated chess computer of the Mephisto RISC series by Hegener & Glaser [5] [6] .

Description

from Don Beal's WMCCC 1991 report [7]:

Written by Ed Schröder (programmer) and Jan Louwman (a strong chess-player and designer of the opening book), both previously known over many years for their Rebel program that run on 6502 pocessors, Gideon is a new program for the ARM-2 RISC CPU and has taken 1.5 years (4000 man-hours) to develop. The evaluation function is complex, incorporating much chess knowledge, and positional scores can range up 1.5 times a Pawn. Gideon includes specialized knowledge for many types of endgame (defined to be when material < 26) such as rook-and-pawn endings. The search techniques include iterative deepening, check extensions and singular extensions. Moves are generated one-at-a-time, rather than all-and-sort. 

Mephisto Gideon

The PC program Mephisto Gideon was developed in cooperation with Hegener & Glaser and was Ed's first program running under the MS-DOS operating system, also bundled as Mephisto Advantage with the Saitek PC Auto Chessboard. It was entirely written in C and marketed by Ossi Weiner and other dealer in large quantities [8], while independently Schröder BV kept their own brand name Rebel selling it via their own distribution channels in smaller quantities [9]. In 2012, Ed Schröder resurrected Mephisto Gideon Professional as WinBoard and UCI compatible donationware [10] [11].

See also

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