Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Building a decent opening book, need advice.

Author: Eric Oldre

Date: 15:07:47 01/06/05

Go up one level in this thread


On January 06, 2005 at 14:33:33, Norm Pollock wrote:

>On January 06, 2005 at 13:20:27, Eric Oldre wrote:
>
>>I have added the ability to add opening books to my latest version of Latista.
>>I'll release it once I create a decent opening and add a couple other smaller
>>features.
>>
>>So far I created a book my parsing the gm2600.pgn file and saving all positions
>>which occur at least 5 times.
>>
>>This is certainly much better than no book at all but leaves much much room for
>>improvment I'm sure.
>>
>>What general advice do you book makers have for me?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Eric
>
>First, may I suggest that you have two opening books, one for white's moves and
>one for black's moves. This way you can "feed" pgns into white's book that have
>white winning (and drawing). Likewise for black's book, you can "feed" pgns into
>black's book that have black winning (and drawing).

currently i store the number of white wins, black wins, and draws for each
position in the book. I can see how it would probably be better from a
space/memory perspective to create 2 separate.


>
>Second, I would also use more recent pgns than in gm2600.pgn because current
>over-the-board players know what the latest changes are in openings, and they
>have the benefit of computer analysis. (Btw, I have made a pgn collection of
>recent games that is available at crafty-chess.com in the user download
>section.) Also limiting the book to games with both players elo 2600+ will mean
>a small book, unless you allow the number of position occurrences to be very
>small (see next paragraph).

Thanks Norm, I'll download that tonight!

>
>Third, no matter how hard you try, bad opening moves are going to be in the
>opening book. The question is how to limit the number of them. I believe the
>best and only reliable approach is to have a very high number for the number of
>occurrences before including that position in the book. I recommend that you use
>12 occurrences if you are starting from a pgn collection of 60K games.
>
>Another approach to quality control is "book learning". I'm not a fan of book
>learning. All I think it does is adjust the statistics for each position (#
>occurrences, win-lose-draw) based on the engine's performance. But if your
>engine is playing an engine 100 elo stronger, why punish the opening because
>your engine lost. The opening might have been excellent. Likewise, why reward a
>poor opening because your engine defeated a weaker opponent.

I had thought about trying to do book learning at some point but had thought of
this also, I'll put it on the "maybe someday" list.

>
>Another point. Some pgn collections have loads of old games, low elo games,
>duplicate games, twin games, blitz, rapid, lightning, email, Internet,
>simultaneous exhibition games and grandmaster short draws. My collection that I
>mentioned before is one of those that has filtered those types of games out. So
>be careful.
>
>Good luck,
>
>Norm



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.