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Subject: Re: Dabbaba needs an openingbook

Author: Steven J. Edwards

Date: 06:22:31 05/28/98

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Concering binary searches of linearly ordered opening book position
libraries, I have found that the probe overhead is really nothing to
worry about, at least when the library is on a reasonably fast hard
drive.  A million position library takes only twenty probes and with
about 5 ms per probe it's only a tenth of a second total.  Using  a
CD-ROM will be a little longer, but even then it's not going to be a
whole lot of time.  Furthermore, a decent OS will cache a lot of the
probe blocks seen in the first few comparisons anyway.  And if you
really want speed, you can cache the top 1024 (ten levels) of comparison
records yourself.

It is true that a file sort of an oprning library is not the fastest
thing to do.  But it only has to be done once.  Furthermore, it you for
some reason want to experiment with a having lots of changes in the
library, I would suggest having multiple library files and then fiddling
with the contents of the smaller ones.

With disk space being relatively inexpensive, and particularly if you
want to have  a massive library, I suggest tha you use a 64 bit hash
code instead of 48 bits.  It's cheap insurance.  And yes, I have seen
false matches with using only 48 bits.

There is the question also on how big the library has to be.  Having a
million position library will cover just about all of modern GM praxis
well into the middlegame.

Scanning PGN files is the way to go.  Years ago I had tried typing in
chunks of ECO, but it's kind of a drag.  The question is how deep to go
in a game while recording the positions; I have this set to 48 ply in
OCD which seems to be a reasonable number.

Aslo, is it necessary to store lossage counts?  I would think that there
might be a better idea here to somehow take advantage of the PGN Date
field to have a weighting factor to select mroe modern moves over older
variations.  Or maybe jsut exclude games older than N number of years
from the original construction scan.

-- Steven (sje@mv.mv.com)



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