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Subject: Re: The Problem with Opening Books for Engines

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 13:06:01 11/19/02

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On November 19, 2002 at 14:31:47, Bob Durrett wrote:

>
>The typical opening book, it seems to me, is designed to give the chess-playing
>program the highest probability of success.  That may be it's weakness!
>
>To improve the statistics, the designer of the opening book will naturally
>include responses to the moves which are most likely to be played.
>
>Similarly, to improve the statistics, the designer of the opening book will
>provide responses to the moves which are considered to be the most challenging.
>For example, an opening book for the engine playing the black side will have a
>lot for 1.e4 but maybe nothing at all for 1.h3.
>
>Generally, early queen sorties are regarded, by the "learned" people, as being
>not worth preparing for.  It is assumed that the engine will easily find the
>refutation without the help of an opening book.
>
>But is that really true?  Or is it *merely* a universal but false assumption?
>
>It occurred to me to use my CB8, with Fritz7 as an analysis engine running under
>CB8, to see how well early queen sorties fared, historically, in human praxis.
>
>I began with a query to identify all games in which White played a queen move on
>his second move.  Amazingly, there were more than 1000 of these games in
>Chessbase's Megabase 2002 database.  I then sorted the games by ELO.  Another
>surprise!  There are many different openings of this type.
>
>I'm now beginning to believe that it would be possible to produce an
>anti-computer opening repertoire consisting solely of openings with early queen
>moves.
>
>Here's an example:
>
>1.d4 f5 2.Qd3
>
>If 2...d5 then maybe best is the line 3.c4 e6 4.g3 c6+/=, which might retain a
>slight advantage for White if Black deviates from this line early enough.
>
>If 2...d6 then either 3.e4 fxe4 4.Qxe4 Nf6 5.Qe3+/= or 3.Nf3 Nc6 4.e4 +/=
>
>If 2...e6 then 3.e4 fxe4 4.Qxe4 Nf6 5.Qh4 b6 6.Bd3+/=
>
>The question is:  would your engine find it's way through this analysis?

The question is if humans can find the right lines.

I suspect that if these lines can be used against computers then they can be
also used against GM's.


Uri



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