Best of Chess

[pohl4711]

Sacs like Rebel's or Patricia's are one way to reach this goal, but there are others. I have spotted some truely amazing zugzwang and "positional" games by Stockfish on my computers, that I enjoyed watching very much. So, a future version of your tool might provide a way to find games with different kinds of beauty, too.

The main problem of all of these tools (my EAS, Eds BoCC etc.) is the speed and the lack of additional data (=engine evals, because not all pgn games are enginegames or have evals stored).
A lot of ideas to find interesting games is just too slow under these conditions. Zugzwag is a nice example: How to detect Zugzwang in a pgn gamesbase? And (more important and IMHO impossible) how to detect Zugzwang very fast in a pgn gamebase? Mention, a gamebase can have easily 100.000 games, meaning at least 7.000.000 moves (70 moves per game), meaning at least 14.000.000 plies to investigate for Zugzwang. Even investigating only endgame positions (5% of 14.000.000 plies or so) would be way too slow... And I have a gamebase containing not 100.000 but 2.000.000 games...

So, in these tools, looking for interesting games, the question is not "Can it be done?", instead the question is "Can it be done very fast?"
And this kills many ideas...

[Rebel]

[Strategic-Insight] makes sense to me.

I am not completely sure if you understand what I am really up to though, so please forgive me for elaborating a Little further.

I agree by design there have to be several games where a "style engine" sacs material to no avail, the other one just takes it - and slowly converts. These games may provide interesting data for its developper, but they are probably not too interesting to watch for a spectator.
In a similar way +most+ games where one engine gets/finds something "random", the other one would too, just a tiny bit later, tend to not be too exciting to watch, at least for chessplayers way weaker than Magnus Carlsen.

Beauty and excitement probably need some element of surprise IMHO. When one engine realizes something important like 5 moves earlier than its appropiately strong opponent, things tend to get fascinating to watch. Sacs like Rebel's or Patricia's are one way to reach this goal, but there are others. I have spotted some truely amazing zugzwang and "positional" games by Stockfish on my computers, that I enjoyed watching very much. So, a future version of your tool might provide a way to find games with different kinds of beauty, too.

Peter

I understood you quite well, just programmer rambling in my answer. I think it can be done with comp-comp games with comments and in a fast way. Human-Human games will be another story, you can't do without analyzing each move in a PGN with an engine. But maybe you can do 1000-5000-10.000 games in one day, dunno.

[Peter Berger]

I actually have no idea how this could be done for human games myself - as we don't know the respective eval of the human players at a certain point of the game. Even judging which human move is great and which one is trivial - can computers really do this in a competent way?
In addition even the very best humans just "blunder" too much for me to be able to imagine that you can just go by eval raise and drop of some engine.
On the other hand top human games get loads of attention in comparison to engine games anyway, especially if we concentrate on classical time control - also the number of relevant games isn't too overwhelming, so there probably is no big need for such a tool. People will just look at interesting games for themselves with the help of an engine or great human commentary.

On the other hand there are the bazillions of engine games few people will ever witness or have a look at..

[Peter Berger]

Good morning Peter,
What I meant is that I don't know how to download games that are compiled in PGN into my book. When I try to import these games into the book, it can't find them. I want to know where to download these games that come in PGN and how to import them into my book.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

How do you usually import games in your "book", that come in some other format than PGN? Which program do you use to do it?

[Chacal X]

Good morning Peter,
What I meant is that I don't know how to download games that are compiled in PGN into my book. When I try to import these games into the book, it can't find them. I want to know where to download these games that come in PGN and how to import them into my book.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

How do you usually import games in your "book", that come in some other format than PGN? Which program do you use to do it?

Hello,
I use Fritz 18 and with several engines downloaded in UCI, to load books or games (from Playchess), I go to opening, click and choose to import games or book, if applicable, but unfortunately, with games in mpgn, it didn't work.

[Peter Berger]

Hello,
I use Fritz 18 and with several engines downloaded in UCI, to load books or games (from Playchess), I go to opening, click and choose to import games or book, if applicable, but unfortunately, with games in mpgn, it didn't work.

I can maybe help you here, although I don't own such a recent Fritz program.

A PGN file is just a text file - you can open it with any program you normally use to read text. You will be able to see all the games in it. If you choose the notation of a single game, you can just copy-paste it in the notation window of your Fritz program e.g., and you can look at it and analyze the game.

A PGN file (with potentially many games) is also a database format your Fritz program knows, so you can open any PGN file with your Fritz program by choosing the PGN format in the -open database function that it will have.

Very advanced features are probably not readily availlable for PGN databases in your Fritz program. But you can create a new database in your Fritz program in its own favourite format ( one of those you already managed to work with). Then you open the PGN database program in Fritz again, mark all the games and choose copy. Then you open the empty database in the native Fritz format and paste the games into it.

With this native Fritz database you can probably use these "import into book" functions without further problems.

Hope this helps.
Peter

[Chacal X]

Hello,
I use Fritz 18 and with several engines downloaded in UCI, to load books or games (from Playchess), I go to opening, click and choose to import games or book, if applicable, but unfortunately, with games in mpgn, it didn't work.

I can maybe help you here, although I don't own such a recent Fritz program.

A PGN file is just a text file - you can open it with any program you normally use to read text. You will be able to see all the games in it. If you choose the notation of a single game, you can just copy-paste it in the notation window of your Fritz program e.g., and you can look at it and analyze the game.

A PGN file (with potentially many games) is also a database format your Fritz program knows, so you can open any PGN file with your Fritz program by choosing the PGN format in the -open database function that it will have.

Very advanced features are probably not readily availlable for PGN databases in your Fritz program. But you can create a new database in your Fritz program in its own favourite format ( one of those you already managed to work with). Then you open the PGN database program in Fritz again, mark all the games and choose copy. Then you open the empty database in the native Fritz format and paste the games into it.

With this native Fritz database you can probably use these "import into book" functions without further problems.

Hope this helps.
Peter

Thank you very much, Peter.
I'll try to resolve this issue calmly. I'm not in the right frame of mind right now.
We'll see tomorrow. Thank you very much, and have a great weekend!

[Chacal X]

Hello,
I use Fritz 18 and with several engines downloaded in UCI, to load books or games (from Playchess), I go to opening, click and choose to import games or book, if applicable, but unfortunately, with games in mpgn, it didn't work.

I can maybe help you here, although I don't own such a recent Fritz program.

A PGN file is just a text file - you can open it with any program you normally use to read text. You will be able to see all the games in it. If you choose the notation of a single game, you can just copy-paste it in the notation window of your Fritz program e.g., and you can look at it and analyze the game.

A PGN file (with potentially many games) is also a database format your Fritz program knows, so you can open any PGN file with your Fritz program by choosing the PGN format in the -open database function that it will have.

Very advanced features are probably not readily availlable for PGN databases in your Fritz program. But you can create a new database in your Fritz program in its own favourite format ( one of those you already managed to work with). Then you open the PGN database program in Fritz again, mark all the games and choose copy. Then you open the empty database in the native Fritz format and paste the games into it.

With this native Fritz database you can probably use these "import into book" functions without further problems.

Hope this helps.
Peter

Thank you very much, Peter.
I'll try to resolve this issue calmly. I'm not in the right frame of mind right now.
We'll see tomorrow. Thank you very much, and have a great weekend!

I DID IT!!!
The secret is at the bottom of the file folder, change it to open in pgn, it worked!!
Thank you very much for the tip and I'm also happy with my stubbornness lol

[Tibono]

I DID IT!!!
The secret is at the bottom of the file folder, change it to open in pgn, it worked!!

Sincerely happy you succeeded with your expectation, but please on next opportunity open a separate thread; as this did not relate much to the 'Best of Chess' topic from the original poster. I appreciate following this topic without new posts notifications that do not relate to.
Warm regards,
Tibono

[Rebel]

I actually have no idea how this could be done for human games myself - as we don't know the respective eval of the human players at a certain point of the game. Even judging which human move is great and which one is trivial - can computers really do this in a competent way?
In addition even the very best humans just "blunder" too much for me to be able to imagine that you can just go by eval raise and drop of some engine.
On the other hand top human games get loads of attention in comparison to engine games anyway, especially if we concentrate on classical time control - also the number of relevant games isn't too overwhelming, so there probably is no big need for such a tool. People will just look at interesting games for themselves with the help of an engine or great human commentary.

On the other hand there are the bazillions of engine games few people will ever witness or have a look at..

Regarding the bazillions of engine games you speak of, that will be an easy one provided the engines are within a +/- margin of 50 elo points. If you play Stockfish against an engine 300 elo less it will outsearch the lesser engine frequently and what you get is not [Strategic Insight] the thing you want but [Tactical Insight].

For human games, use (write) a tool that analysis PGN games first with scores inside, then treat them as comp-comp games.