Asri-unix.466 net.chess utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!BARRETT@BBNG Fri Jan 8 02:18:03 1982 on-line library & storing positions In response to Mike Yoder's comment about the usefulness of storing random middlegame positions: All this discussion of position storing has started me thinking again about something I worked on some time ago, namely an on-line chess library. What I was interested in trying to do was build up a data base of games (and fragments), with each entry consisting of a position and a list of (known) moves from that position. By known moves, I mean those which came from games which have been put into the data base. Other useful information could be attached to the list of moves; what the opening was, who was playing, what event, source of the game (so you can go look up prose analysis in the book), etc. In addition to being useful as a reference tool, it might also be useful as a type of book for a program to play from. In particular, it might be useful as part of a pattern matching sort of thing. Since pattern matching seems to play an important role in how people think about chess, this sort of scheme might be useful in non-brute-force type programs. I think the Huffman coding scheme may not work well for the pattern matching aspect though. It looks like it would be non-trivial to collect the set of known positions which have a given pawn structure, for example, since in order to compare a position with the desired setup would require decoding the entire position first. It may be that a trade-off has to be made here between compactness of storage and ease (and speed) of retrieval. Kim ------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.