This brings me down to earth again!!! And whats the most important thing for me. As a packager for a distribution the chess engines will be mostly used by usual chess playing people. Strength matters of cause, but if I think further, what matters more is:Marc Lacrosse wrote: But don't worry too much : as long as you simply use PG's powerful heuristic to build a generic book from a careful selection of games you will end with something valuable.
See for example this little test . In fact my best-performing private "generic" book is only 25 Elo points better than performance.bin .
... but when you go into hand-tuned selected-lines books you may hope for much better performances but this is in fact really another world.
- variety in play and
- that the engine will play openings this people will know or like
So your impressive conclusion about chess strength with/witout opening book, helped me a lot to see:
I will not make anything wrong providing my own book, and there has not to be every bleeding edge opening variation included.
Thanks a lot Marc this was not the help I expected, but the one I needed ;o)
Oliver