Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 20:09:15 01/20/03
In another thread Robert Hyatt mentioned that he didn't do any book preparation for CCT5. This aroused my curiosity, since I don't know how you would do "book preparation", or book creation in the first place. There are many ways to go about creating an opening book. For those of us who are never going to hire a professional book maker, what is the best method? A few that come to mind are: 1. Creating an opening book from a collection of PGN files, which seems to be very popular. 2. Creating your own book by hand. Might be bad if you aren't very good at chess. 3. Creating a book by letting your engine search for a period of time and then adding the best move as the move to play in a given position. This would seem to be good only for the effect of not wasting time searching in the opening. 4. Maybe hiring a master player to check your book for sub-optimal lines. I'm not sure if this is much different from simply hiring a professional book maker. If you have other methods, I'd like to hear them. Creating an opening book seems like a double edged sword to me. On the one hand, since computers sometimes shoot themselves in the foot in the opening, you have the opportunity to prevent your engine from making a fool of itself in a position it does not understand. On the other hand, YOU might shoot your engine in the foot if you add a bad line, or have a bug in the opening book (ex. Diep in CCT5). It seems like a difficult issue. It would be ok if you took good lines from an opening book such as MCO or other similar books, but while you might avoid shooting yourself in the foot by having only good lines, your engine may not be particularly well suited for the types of games that arise from certain openings. The same problem occurs when you generate a book from PGN games. Book creation seems like a completely different science than computer chess in some respects, and to my knowledge there is no resource that discusses the art/science of book making. So how does one learn about the black art of book making?
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