2.1 released

Download link over there --->

Password = pioner_Uptown21

Uptown 2.1

Uptown 2.1 has been finalized and entered into the latest Pioner tournament. Obviously with the release of Rybka 4 since the latest tournament things have changed significantly, and we'll see how Uptown 2.1 + Rybka 4 works together.

Regardless of the outcome, Uptown 2.1 will be made public within the next few days. This will also be the last book I publish for a while, I'm taking a break from book making to focus on other things.

Thanks for reading!

Brandon

Uno

Well, looks like the new approach worked! First place, and by a pretty impressive margin! 52 elo and 8% above the next closest book.

Thanks everyone for all the PM's, comments and emails, I appreciate it.

I know everyone is interested in using the book, and I absolutely promise to make it public. It's just a matter of when. I'd like to get in one more tournament before making it public (SCCT?!) and we have a big holiday coming up here in the US.

As soon as I decide to make it public, I will post it on a few forums, as well as on this website.

Uptown 2.0

Uptown 2.0 is finally out. It is completely re-written based on 100% games played on my hardware. No external games from any source were used or imported!

It takes a very unique approach to opening moves. I haven't seen any book do anything similar, and in my testing it seems to be working very well. Uptown 2.0 has been entered in the latest Pioner tournament, so hopefully we should find out just how successful this strategy is!

Midtown 1.0 for download

I've started from scratch on a new book, so Midtown is not going to be updated.

Midtown takes a very hypermodern approach to openings, playing a lot of Larsen openings (1.b3) and pirc/modern defense as black. This can result in some very dangerous situations, but it will almost certainly throw a lot of people out book early. I would recommend that if you use this book, you have at least a quad-core PC. If you play with Midtown using a dual-core PC against someone with a quad-core, you will probably lose. This is just the way hypermodern strategies work, they rely heavily on an opponent making a mistake.

Hope you enjoy, but like I said, be careful how you use it. :)

Please see this forum post for download location.


Brandon

Midtown

I was very pleased with the results of Uptown 1.5 in Sedat's Prize Tournament I. 5th place is a great accomplishment, especially given the quality of competitors present. However, in reviewing the games played, I've started to become disillusioned / frustrated with the current "standard" opening of B90.

It seems we have two options currently. Continue to play the B90 game, and compete with the many authors who continue to tweak and perfect the existing lines, or to search out new land to explore. For the next SCCT Prize Tournament, I've chosen the latter, and have created a new tournament book, called 'Midtown'.

As far as the fate of the "Uptown" book series, I'm undecided. I do enjoy adding new lines to the book, and sharing them with the community, but I won't be able to dedicate my time to it 100% as I was previously. Right now I do plan to update "Uptown" but the updates may be slow and few.

SCCT Prize Tournament II is scheduled in ~ 2 weeks, so I'll know more when see how Midtown performs.

How to test engine strength

I've seen a few people share their engine tests, and I just wanted to mention the concept of test suites, as this is the most accurate way of testing an engine.

When you test engines, you want to remove as many variables as possible. Many people will test engines with an opening book, which is a mistake. Unless the opening book is 100% neutral (meaning that every line ends with an evaluation of +0.00) then the test will be inaccurate. The easiest way to remove that problem is to not use opening books. However, this means the engines have to take time trying to evaluate e2-e4 or basic opening moves. This means they will have less time to evaluate the positions that really make a difference.

That is where test suites come in. Suites are special opening books that start games in certain positions in order to measure engine strength. This removes the need for traditional opening books, and also allows the engines to put their full power into processing important positions, and avoid wasting time on such basic positions such as e2-e4, etc.. Another important aspect of test suites is that the results are able to be reproduced 100%, using the same hardware. Playing a standard engine match is not, as an engine may choose to open with e2-e4 one time, and then choosing to open with c2-c4 the next time.

If you really want to get an accurate measurement of engine strength, using test suites is the best way to test engines against each other.

Currently, I use the Silver Openings Suite test suite, but I believe Fritz also ships with a test suite that comes pre-installed, called the Nunn test suite (named after its author, GM John Nunn).

Here's a good article that covers the basics, and gives step by step instructions on how to use the Silver Openings Suite.

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6147

Just as a side note, I finished test Firebird 1.1 against Rybka 3 using the Silver Openings Suite, with controls of 4+2. Results were +31=51-11, in favor of Firebird 1.1

Tablebases

If you are a serious computer chess user, end-game tablebases are required. The 3-4-5 bases are widely available for download and are (relatively) small at about ~7GB. However, the 6-man bases are much, much larger. As I do not have 1TB of disk space to devote to the full 6-man set, I use a selected set of them. I have found this subset to be very good at covering many end-game scenarios, so I wanted to share them with you. The set I currently use is as follows.

krppkr > kqrpkr > kqqrkr = 10.91gb
krpkrp > kqrkrp > kqrkqr = 12.77gb

kppkpp > kqpkpp > kqpkqp > kqqkqp > kqqkqq =12.15gb

kpppkn,b > kqppkn,b > kqqpkn,b = 11.53gb
knppkr > kqnpkr > kqqnkr = 11.48gb
kbppkr > kqbpkr > kqqbkr = 12.45gb
rrp vs. q > qrr vs. q = 7.2gb


This entire subset requires about 80GB of space, and provides a good amount of coverage for frequently played 6-man scenarios.

You can download the full 6-man set (or whichever portions you would like) from Steinar H. Gunderson's website below.

Please note - Do not use a "download accelerator" or any other program that will download more than 1 file at a time! If you have more than 1 concurrent download, you will be banned. Please use responsibly.

http://tablebase.sesse.net/

Brandon

LesChats & Monferrat

Jordi has released two new versions of his books, LesChats and Monferrat. Very impressive work, as usual. You can download them at Jordi's website.

Back!

I'm back, and slightly sunburned, but a good time was had by all.

Working very quickly to update Uptown with some changes, a number of very strong books were released while I was gone. Looking forward to getting the new version over to Sedat for the next round of the SCCT 2010 tournament.

Vacation

Returning 20 Feb. See you in a week. :)

Uptown 1.2

1.2 for public release. Download link over there.. --->

Please let me know how you like it, and if you have the time I'd appreciate any games you could send me. PGN works best, but I'll take it however you can send it.

Brandon

7!

Sedat's tournament is over, and Uptown 1.0 finished very well, in 7th place out of 195. I'm very happy with that, especially knowing that version 1.0 had some serious problems, especially in B90.

I'm also happy with Uptown 1.0's performance with Deep Shredder 12, which was the secondary engine used in the tournament. It it's now the top Deep Shredder 12 book, currently in 4th places, behind Rybka, Stockfish and Naum 4.1.

I'm hoping to release the latest version of Uptown (currently 1.13) in 1-2 days.

Congratulations to all the participants of this round of SCCT 2010.

Brandon

Uptown Status

It's been some time since I've posted, but I wanted to assure everyone that the latest version of Uptown will be released after the SCCT2010 results. From what I've heard from Sedat, things are looking very good for Uptown.

If you're wondering what I've been up to recently, I was doing research on the possibilities of black winning via B06/B08, as 1. e4 g6 has always been interesting to me. However, after some very interesting results and about 2 weeks of research, I'm officially giving up on that line. I will tell you, however, if you would like to see Rybka 3 give some very wrong evaluations, play a few B06 games. I may release the B06/B08 book that came out of the research at a later date, I'm not sure.

Hopefully SCCT2010 will be done soon and Uptown will be made public.

Thanks for reading.

Brandon

Uptown Tournament results

Here are the results from my internal tournament that ran over two days. Now I'm not claiming that these are ideal conditions, in fact they don't even replicate Sedat or PionerChess's time controls, but I think it does provide a good idea that Uptown 1.0 is ready for the world.

Apologies for the image, I have yet to figure out how to export tournament results from the Fritz GUI without them looking like crap.

Brandon

Uptown 1.0 is complete

I finished Uptown 1.0 this morning, and submitted it to Sedat for the SCCT tournament this afternoon. I'll post the results of my internal proving tournament when it completes, but so far Uptown 1.0 is in first place.

I am running the tournament as 1+0 with Rybka 3 for all books. 128MB Hash. The following is the list of books in the tournament.

1 - Uptown 1.0
2 - Matrix2Dx64
3 - NoWay3.0
5 - MontFerrat 2010
6 - Il konte 3.9
7 - Zeeman 1.3
8 - MyBook 19
9 - LesChats 1c
10 - Don 9
11 - Firestarter
12 - FlyorDie 1.1

Full results in ~ 2 days, when the tournament completes.

Uptown v 1.0

I received the information I needed from Sedat, so I have begun compiling all of my research and game databases to create Uptown 1.0, which will be participating in the latest SCCT tournament.

It will be a very strong book, and I expect it to do well.

To be honest, I was planning on releasing it to the public after the tournament had started (25 January). I'm undecided if I should release it on 25 January, or wait until the SCCT tournament has been completed. I'm not sure what I'll do.

On a similar note, I did confirm that Uptown v0.06 (latest public release) was entered into the Pioneerchess tournament, which began 16 January and is expected to finish 25 January.

Uptown v 0.06 is a good book, but I know for a fact that some of the competitors have stronger books. I'll be interested to see the final tournament results, but I do not expect Uptown v 0.06 to place in the top 10. Anything is possible though, we'll just have to wait for the results.

Thanks for reading, next post will be after I submit Uptown 1.0 to the SCCT Tournament.

-Brandon

Uptown improvements

Things have been quiet on the Uptown Chess blog, but that doesn't mean things have been quiet with the Uptown opening book. Ever since releasing v0.06 I've been working on the next great release. While I was pleased with the performance of v0.06, I've received over 1,800 games from some very helpful users which pitted Uptown v0.06 against some of today's strongest opening books. Those games have helped identify a number of weak lines, as well as improper variation weighting. I'm proud to announce the next version of Uptown should be released within the next week. Right now I'm targeting 23 January, but that will depend on a few things. The most important factor is Sedat's tournament start date. Obviously I want to keep the book private until I have confirmation that the tournament has been started, and no more submissions are allowed. At that point, I will be releasing the book to the public.

While I won't go into the technical details of the changes to the latest version of Uptown, I will share some results with you. All of these are Rybka 3 @ 1+0.

As you can see, things are going well. I look forward to the outcome of Sedat's tournament, and I'm hopeful that Uptown will do very well.

Brandon

Some new books

This will be slightly old news for many of you that follow opening books closely, but my good friend Edmond has released his newest book, Il_Konte 3.9. He's put a lot of hard work into it, and it shows. A very strong book. You can download it here.

Some other books that I like, that are relatively new.

• No Way 3.0 (it's very big, but strong). Download here.
• Montferrat, by Jordi Ruiz. Download here. Settings here.

v0.06 Download

http://www.multiupload.com/7SKT18QO2B

v0.06 Results

Download database from this tournament.



No download available at this time


I also ran a test against the Hiarcs 12.1 book, as a suggested by a very knowledgable person. Here are the results from those tests (1+0, 3+0).

Uptown v0.06 Initial Results

Looks like a large improvement over version 0.05.

I'm very happy with this version, seems much stronger in many aspects than Uptown 0.05.






More results from my internal book tournament with Uptown v0.06, Canon Closed 2, Hurriance 3, and Famine tomorrow. Most likely I will post the download link tomorrow as well.

BrandonSi

Updated Version

Well, this is a bit embarrassing, but I'm new to making books after all. I'm always learning! I did get some very good feedback from a few users and there's a pretty big issue with a few lines in Uptown v0.05. While it did very well against most books, it got simply destroyed when those "problem lines" were played. I've since updated the book, and am in the process of verifying this is resolved.

As a result, I've removed the download links, and will replace them with the updated book soon.

I've also shared a few emails with the fine folks over at Pioneerchess and Sedat, from the famous SCCT tournaments and hopefully Uptown should be a contestant in their next tournaments.

I will be releasing the latest version of Uptown (0.06) in the next few days, along with the results from my internal tests.

Tournament Games

I've decided to share the first 100 games Uptown played against Zeeman, Les Chats and MyBook 19. I will make them available for download this evening, or tomorrow, depending on how much time I have tonight.

For those of you interested, I'll also be posting the continued results of the tournament I shared the initial results from.

Download Links

Uptown v0.06

http://www.multiupload.com/7SKT18QO2B

Uptown 05 Tournament Results Tomorrow

After 4 internal revisions of my Uptown book, I'm finally running it against other books, including MyBook 19, Les Chats 1.0, Zeeman 1.3.

Assuming it doesn't fail miserably (my initial tests were promising) I'll be posting the results tomorrow and releasing the book shortly.

For reference, the hardware I'm using is a Dell Dimension E510.

Processor : Intel Pentium D 2.6Ghz
Memory (RAM) : 512MB


All games are 3+0, hash is unified at 64MB.

Book options (applied to every book)

• Use Book - Checked
• Tournament Book - Checked
• Variety of Play - Minimum
• Influence of Learn Value - maximum
• Learning Strength - Minimum
• Minimum Games - 1
• Up to Move - 99