The Best Opening Book Ever Made
During the last 12 years we have closely followed the evolution of Artificial Intelligence in chess; especially after the release of Stockfish in 2008 the chess engine’s strength developed very fast year by year. Stockfish dominated the computer chess tournaments, mainly fighting against Komodo and Houdini for the “best chess engine of the world title”. However, a chess revolution started in December 2017, Stockfish 8 was used as a benchmark to test Google division Deepmind’s AlphaZero, with each engine supported by different hardware.
AlphaZero is an Artificial Intelligence using a Neural Network System. This program trained through self-play for a total of nine hours and reached Stockfish’s level after just four. In 100 games from the normal starting position, AlphaZero won 25 games as White, won 3 as Black, and drew the remaining 72, with 0 losses.
The introduction of the Neural Networks approach to the chess world changed everything, AlphaZero’s skills surpassed the knowledge that took humans nearly 1,400 years to achieve. In 2017 it was almost unthinkable that another chess program could beat Stockfish, but Alpha convincingly did. At that moment people realized that chess would never be the same again. We agree with the opinion of GM Peter Nielsen about this chess revolution: “I have always wondered how it would be if a superior race landed on earth and taught us how they play chess, and now I feel like I already know”.
The Alpha Zero approach inspired the chess engine developers and they quickly started to implement the neural network idea to their programs. In January 2018 the Leela Chess Zero project was first announced on TalkChess.com, a program inspired by Alpha Zero, but available for everyone. This revealed Leela Chess Zero as the open-source, self-learning chess engine to create a strong chess engine. Within the first few months of training, Leela Chess Zero had already reached the Grandmaster level, surpassing the strength of early releases of Rybka, Stockfish, and Komodo.
Leela continued to improve month by month using its machine-learning algorithm. In February 2019, Leela scored its first major tournament win when it defeated Houdini in the final of the second TCEC cup. Leela did not lose a game during the entire tournament.
Finally, Stockfish developers also continued to improve their program and in 2020 they came out with the latest chess bomb. In June 2020 an efficiently updatable neural network (NNUE) fork introduced by computer shogi programmers called Stockfish NNUE was discussed by developers. In July 2020 chess news reported that Stockfish NNUE had “broken new ground in computer chess by incorporating a neural network into the already incredibly powerful Stockfish chess engine.” A NNUE merge into Stockfish was then announced and development builds became available.
Nowadays Stockfish NNUE and Leela Chess Zero are dominating the computer chess tournaments and chess analysis tasks.
After that summary of chess engines history, we can introduce our NeoBook Project, because it was created using the previously mentioned chess technology advancements.
NeoBook is the best opening book ever made. Its acronym in English NEO stands for Neural Engine of Openings as it was designed using the most recent trend in chess analysis: neural networks inspired by Google’s ambitious Alpha Zero project.
Neobook was built with the best chess games in history between humans and computers. It includes all chess openings that exist and the respective analysis of the most played openings.
This project was born out of a chess player’s dream that Artificial Intelligence and the latest trends in chess analysis would be more accessible to everyone. At NeoChess we believe that all chess players should be part of The New Era. We can’t wait to share with you the Best Opening Tool Ever Created.
The main attraction of the book is the quality of the information that is offered to the users and the interactive way it is shown. We have:
1. Evaluations:
Numeric evaluations that help people to assess a position. They are the perfect balance between artificial intelligence and human understanding, thanks to an exhaustive analysis performed with powerful computers and the strongest chess engines: Leela Zero, Stockfish NNUE, Fat Fritz, and Dragon.
It includes constant updates to ensure the latest and most accurate advancements. With this feature, any player will be able to have in the palm of his hand the most precise analyzes that can be done today without spending money on expensive computers or renting them to analyze.
It is not a secret that the best players in the world use computer analysis to improve their understanding and memorization of openings, even hiring other renowned Masters to perform the analyzes, as it is hard work, requiring years of experience and a lot of analysis time. NeoBook allows you to train at the level of the world’s elite and gives you an immense competitive advantage.
2. Chess symbols:
NeoBook uses traditional and well-known chess symbols to simplify the understanding of each move:
Moves:
(! !) – Brilliant Move
(!) – Best Move
(!?) – Interesting Move
(?!) – Dubious Move
(?) – Bad Move
Evaluation:
(=) – Equal
(+=) – Slightly better for white
(=+) – Slightly better for black
(+/-) – Advantage for white
(-/+) – Advantage for black
(+-) – Decisive advantage for white
(-+) – Decisive advantage for black
3. Colors:
NeoBook uses colors to make it even easier for users to understand each move.
Green: Good Move or Recommended to play
Black: Playable Move
Yellow: Inaccurate Move
Blue: Interesting Move
Red: Bad Move, Not recommended to play
4. Videos and Comments:
Later, we will include video lessons and comments by strong chess masters and opening experts to help users to understand every move with words. It will be ready in some months and will be constantly updated.