TalkChess.com

[Edsel Apostol]

This is just my theory, I may be right and I may be wrong. Don't take this as a fact.

I think that it is not an exact clone. Meaning it is not an exact copy. There are parts that may be Rybka and there are parts that are not, more like a Frankenstein chess engine. I think it only has parts from Rybka, most probably the eval minus the material tables. I am not sure about the search though. I think that the search was improved resulting to it probably being better than Rybka 3.

Difference in eval may be explained by not using the Rybka material table (I might be wrong and Rybka 3 might not be using any tables at all), instead they use values something like that of Fruit.

By this differences in search and eval, the playing style could be different. It's like the same engine with just a different personality (some weights are different, some search parameters are different).

Based on their web page I think the one who did this wrote the original code in a Russian language using Russian alphabet, incorporating the ideas from the reverse engineered Rybka. Then they translate the code into the common alphabet (I don't know what our English alphabet is called) but still Russian. Then they translate the code to English through some translation tool or something. That's why the resulting code seems obscured but it can be easily understood by any good programmer.