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Subject: Re: Building an opening book

Author: Will Singleton

Date: 11:05:10 04/07/98

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On April 06, 1998 at 20:47:22, Brian McKinley wrote:

>I am working on a losers chess program and it plays very poorly in the
>opening.  The program does not currently support an opening book.  I
>would like to collect games of strong players on ICC and build an
>opening book based on these games, but I am not sure how to go about it.
>
>I have seen references here and one ICC that lead me to believe that the
>most common method for creating an opening book is from a game database.
>
>Are there any utilities available to help me in this endeavor?  If so
>what format do they require the games data to be in, and how do I get to
>that format from pgn?  Is the format of the opening book output
>documented or is there example code to read it?
>
>If there are no utilities available, is there any other criteria I
>should consider besides win vs. loss when determining whether to include
>the opening moves in the book?
>
>Thanks in advance
>
>Brian


Yes, I went through a lot of searching when I was looking for a book,
and I ended up doing two things.  One was to get a bunch of chessbase
opening files from the internet chess library, then use a utility called
cb2pgn to convert those to pgn.  Then I wrote some code to sort and
otherwise process the pgn stuff into a form my program could use.

Another method is to get some pgn files of master games, also available
at the icl, and then sort, eliminate bad games, gambits and dupes.

It's a bunch of work, but I don't know of a way around it.  And once you
get it done, you can always add more material, improve the book, add
learning, etc.

Will



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