Author: Madhavan
Date: 07:33:54 07/13/05
Hello all, I'd like to move the post from CTF to here because the topic was completely about opening book,brilliantly written by Peter Berger. This stuff could raise discussion or atleast something to read about Peter's view on how he made the book. Here is the actual link being posted in CTF forum,don't view the whole thread please :-) http://www.talkchess.com/forums/2/message.html?175013 I don't have any idea about how to make opening book for engines,so please Peter is the right person to answer any of your questions. May be I could paste the stuff carefully ignoring his stuff about Vincent :) [Quote] It might also matter that I used to do tournament books for another amateur program that was often underestimated in the past , but used to do well with them in the CCTs, Gerrit Reubold's Bringer ( on these I actually spent a few thousand hours LOL). Another rumour I mostly don't really believe in is that books have to be carefully adapted to the engine's character, at least not for the strongest competitors, because their style is not really that different anyway. I don't think that if they had to swap their preffered openings, but still could have the same level of book quality, you would note any difference in results. But then they have all been playing nothing but the Najdorf for years anyway :) . The same is not really true for Crafty. It has some clear strengths but also some clear weaknesses that have to be taken into account when you want to do a book. And when you think of the tournament games , the first two games against Shredder and Sjeng basically had no middlegame at all ( which was Shredder's decision in game 1 though ;) ). I think this is mostly what his positive feedback is based on, besides that he thought that it was a very clever idea to be out of book against Diep after 1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. cxd5 , which looks a bit superstitious to me :) . No one (except me) has any additional data to reach any sensible conclusion about the quality of Crafty's book in Ramat-Gan, other than the 11 games played in the tournament, so I'd say people just have no idea, it's nothing but rumours. The book is not availlable for download yet for practical reasons only. A considerable time of preparation goes into lines no one ever plays ( say how to counter 1. b4 or 1. f4 or 1. g4 or other stuff like that) . This part of preparation doesn't have to be redone even if you change the whole repertoire, but it could make Crafty vulnerable if it were published. The major reason why I think that it is easy to considerably weaken an engine by an opening book is the strength explosion of engines in recent years (there would be some other reasons too). There are a lot of tactical mistakes in human analysis, that you don't want to repeat when the alternative is a move an engine has calculated for itself for about 5 minutes on sth like a Quad Opteron. I think this is difficult to admit for semi-professional book cooks : two games from Ramat-Gan that I think are worth a closer look are Crafty-Shredder and Falcon-Shredder e.g. Another issue would be the kind of stuff you get with automated books when you find the engine in a Ben-Oni or French structure that doesn't suit it at all. It often would have been better to have no book at all then :) . So it looks like a sensible approach to me to at first make *very* sure that you don't weaken the engine before getting overly ambitious :) . When it is about testing: I basically have no clue if "my" book is really any better than a random book in an absolute sense ( whatever this is supposed to mean) - isn't that a scary thought :) ? I don't think so , as for one it is very difficult to setup a valid test scenario (learning is an issue e.g.) and on the other hand the time saved can be used in a better way IMHO :), e.g. by ironing out known weaknesses. Oh - and btw: I haven't written a single line of the new one yet and won't start for another two weeks ( very amateur-like) . But Chris Taylor's autoplayers will support the Crafty team again, and they produce data faster than anyone can draw any conclusions from anyway. Testing is mostly done against random top commercials at medium time control. [End of Quote] I'm weak at openings,Peter.They are the audience,I'm not the right person to answer the above master piece. Thanks
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