Revolution Crowned SCCT NN-CS-65 Champion – A Tribute to Sedat Canbaz and SedatChess
The latest edition of SCCT NN-CS-65 at SedatChess has concluded with a remarkable result: Revolution 3.60 has taken first place in its very first participation, emerging as champion ahead of an elite field of 3800+ Elo engines.(Google Sites)
Hosted on SedatChess, the long-running home of Sedat’s Computer Chess Tournaments (SCCT), this NNUE championship assembled many of today’s most advanced AVX2-optimised engines under carefully standardised conditions. According to the official crosstable, Revolution 3.60 leads the table with an estimated 3841 Elo, narrowly ahead of Stockfish X 231125 and several other top Stockfish derivatives, after 2600 games with a score slightly above 53% and a draw ratio close to 88%.(Google Sites)
This performance is not only a milestone for the Revolution UCI chess engine project, it is also a testament to the quality and fairness of the testing environment that Sedat Canbaz has built and maintained over decades.
Revolution at the top of an elite NNUE field
Revolution is a free, open-source UCI chess engine derived from Stockfish 17.1, developed by Jorge Ruiz and the Stockfish team under the GNU GPL v3 licence.(GitHub) The project focuses on structural experimentation: search refinements, book handling, and learning mechanisms, while preserving full compatibility with standard GUIs such as Fritz, Arena, Cute Chess and others.(GitHub)
Key characteristics of the current tournament build include:
- Stockfish 17.1–based NNUE evaluation, benefitting from the latest network architectures and heuristics.
- Advanced book management, allowing flexible use of Polyglot and CTG books across two slots with fine-grained width and depth controls.(GitHub)
- BrainLearn-style experience integration, enabling persistent learning via
.expfiles and optional Q-learning modes for long-term self-play.(GitHub)
In SCCT NN-CS-65, all top engines were tested as AVX2 builds using their default evaluation files, with engine learning explicitly disabled to ensure that no participant gained an advantage from prior experience. A unique opening book with more than 1,100 carefully selected lines, each repeated with reversed colours, was used to stabilise statistics and minimise bias from specific openings.(Google Sites)
Under these conditions, Revolution’s 3841 Elo at the top of the table—roughly +2 Elo over Stockfish X 231125 in this specific framework—indicates that its structural changes, time-management policies and learning-aware design stand up to the very strongest contemporary NNUE engines when evaluated in a rigorously controlled environment.(Google Sites)
For an engine whose explicit goal is to explore new ideas while remaining fully transparent and open-source, this result is an important validation of the project’s direction.
The importance of SCCT and SedatChess as a testbed
While it is natural to celebrate the success of a single engine, it would be incomplete to do so without emphasising the indispensable role of Sedat Canbaz and his SedatChess platform.
SedatChess has been online since the early 2000s and is entirely dedicated to computer-chess testing: ratings, tournaments, benchmarks, specialised opening books, and unique test suites. The site’s news and tournament pages read almost like a historical logbook of modern engine development, featuring an uninterrupted sequence of SCCT Book/NNUE competitions, classic engine championships, duels and number-one overviews covering nearly two decades.(Google Sites)
On the “About” page, Sedat introduces himself simply as the organiser of Sedat’s Computer Chess Tournaments (SCCT), based in Antalya, Turkey. But his activity goes far beyond tournament direction: he has become a recognised authority in test-suite design, deep opening-book construction and fair, reproducible engine testing.(Google Sites)
Perfect Opening Books and world-class testing tools
One of Sedat’s most enduring contributions to the community is the Perfect series of opening books, which are widely used as a reference in engine competitions. The Perfect 2023 books, published under a freeware licence, are available in multiple formats—Arena (ABK), ChessBase (CTG), Polyglot (BIN) and ShredderClassic (BKT)—and have been tuned using millions of high-quality engine games.(Google Sites)
External sources such as Chessengeria describe Sedat as a “computer chess expert” who has been active for over two decades and highlight Perfect as one of the best opening-book families for serious engine testing.(chessengeria.eu) Perfect 2023 is also integrated into third-party GUIs and toolchains—such as BearChess—further underlining its status as a trusted benchmark tool for modern engines.(solanosoft.com)
Alongside Perfect, Sedat has authored specialised SCCT, CEDR and other deep books, as well as a Unique Test Suite hosted on SedatChess, all designed to probe engines under realistic yet demanding conditions.(Google Sites) His philosophy is clear: strong, well-constructed openings and robust test frameworks are indispensable if we want tournament results to reflect genuine engine strength rather than artefacts of weak or unbalanced starting positions.
In that context, Revolution’s victory in NN-CS-65 gains extra significance: it is not only winning games, it is doing so in a framework explicitly crafted to be tough, fair and statistically meaningful.
A shared achievement: engine authors and tournament directors
It is easy to focus solely on engine authors when a new champion appears, but Sedat himself often reminds readers that programmers, tournament directors and book authors form a single ecosystem. In his own words, he has repeatedly argued that without serious, honest testers and high-quality book creators, engine progress would be much harder to measure and far less transparent.(Google Sites)
Revolution’s performance in SCCT NN-CS-65 is therefore a shared success:
- For the Revolution project, it confirms that the engine’s experimental design choices compete at the very highest level of NNUE chess.
- For SedatChess and SCCT, it showcases once again that Sedat’s tournaments are among the most respected and closely followed testbeds in computer chess today.
- For the broader community, it demonstrates how an open, collaborative approach—open-source engines, freely distributed opening books, and public crosstables—continues to drive progress.
Gratitude and next steps
On behalf of the Revolution project, I would like to express sincere gratitude to Sedat Canbaz:
- for inviting Revolution to participate in this demanding NN-CS-65 edition,
- for maintaining SedatChess as an independent, meticulously curated reference point,
- and for his decades of dedication to tournaments, test suites and opening books that have helped shape the modern engine landscape.(Google Sites)
Developers and engine enthusiasts who wish to explore the champion can find the latest Revolution source code and documentation on GitHub, while full standings and methodological details of NN-CS-65 are available on SedatChess:
- Revolution GitHub repository:
github.com/jordiqui/revolution(GitHub) - SCCT NN-CS-65 official page (SedatChess):
scct-nn-cs-65under the Tournaments section.(Google Sites)
Revolution’s title in SCCT NN-CS-65 is an important milestone, but it is also just one step in an ongoing dialogue between engine authors, testers and book creators. With contributors like Sedat Canbaz setting the standard for rigorous testing, the future of computer chess research remains in excellent hands.