I've mining ETH for a long time, but I mined some RVN before
The algo Kawpow was made to not work with Asics or at least to make the life os Asics devs very hard, it's the 3rd algo of RVN evolution.
Explaining in a simple way, it's like a couple of algos and the order of these are based on the hash of the last generated block.
It's better to read the official info here:
The algorithm is intended to address the centralization of mining caused by ASIC hardware. In the original X16R algorithm paper, the team behind the currency explains that the fixed order of ordinary hashing algorithms lends itself to the construction of ASIC miners.
The initial X16R algorithm aimed to overcome this problem by constantly disrupting the ordering of the hashing algorithms – it uses the same algorithms used in X15 and SHA512, but the ordering of those algorithms was changed based on the hash of the previous block. Eventually it became economically viable for X16R ASIC's and the community decided to implement new algorithms to mitigate the unfair distribution of Ravencoin. The community has carried out 2 algorithm forks to date to mitigate the potential efficiency improvements of the ASIC miners equipment compared to over the counter consumer grade equipment.
The current KAWPOW algorithm aims to overcome the problem of centralisation of mining by utilising over the counter graphic processing unit (GPU) memory and compute capabilities. This is intended to allow most consumer grade GPU hardware to mine Ravencoin. The KAWPOW algorithm was derived from ProgPOW and ethhash, with modifications, to improve the distribution of Ravencoin to everyone.
Source:
https://ravencoin.org/about/If you're interested to understand better, just click on the source
There's a whitepaper of X16R algo:
https://ravencoin.org/assets/documents/X16R-Whitepaper.pdfYou can read too