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Subject: Re: The opening book is extreamly important for a chess engine.....Jorge....

Author: Peter Berger

Date: 04:47:19 09/23/04

Go up one level in this thread


On September 22, 2004 at 09:49:30, Vasik Rajlich wrote:

>On September 22, 2004 at 04:32:02, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>On September 22, 2004 at 04:00:18, WAEL  DEEB wrote:
>>
>>>...is proving it with his fantastic book oriented tournaments!
>>
>>If the engine is strong enough to find better moves by itself then opening book
>>is not needed.
>>
>>This is a good reason to try to develop stronger engines instead of working on
>>opening books because when the engine get stronger the opening book problem will
>>be solved automatically because the engine is not going to need a book to avoid
>>blunders.
>>
>>Uri
>
>It's already the case. The top engines, on top hardware, play better than the
>deeper lines in their opening books.
>
>Take a look at the Shredder-Hydra match. Every game, Shredder's opening book was
>deeper than Hydra's. It was just suicide.
>
>Vas

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. A good opening book is still
useful and an improvement in case every single move in it has been checked by
the book author together with an engine.

But the time for books that contain some automatically imported grandmaster
games as a basis, even if only partly, may be over.

The general trend is obvious IMHO. With Genius 2 you could buy an additional
opening book, called "tournament book" which was mainly a collection of
grandmaster opening lines. At that time this was an improvement. Today it means
that you 'll end up with -1 out of book quite frequently.

With MChess you got several long and tricky lines worked out by a human, but not
checked by an engine in the way you could do it today, just as hardware was not
that great - and some of these lines contain blunders computers can find and
punish easily.

I think some of the books of current professional programs suffer from the fact
that they are built like evolution - somewhere they still have sth like NCO or
GM games as their basis.

The problem will be less if this automated book is only used for the first ten
moves or sth like that.

Peter



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