well indeed minimax is nothing new; but sure Brainfish
seems to give quite a decent/good book (although it's not
clear for me how it's book learning works), but it's not the
only recent effort in this area, Ed Schroder last year
also worked on such topics: see eg :
http://rebel13.nl/prodeo/index.html
http://rebel13.nl/misc/ebf/protools.html
Sofar most opening books still are in GUI format; in future i
think we need better standardization (considering that polyglot
has not so much features as a 'perfect' book would need and
thus also is not the ideal solution). For your (and the Brainfish
author's) info, last year there was a long discussion (thread) on
opening books, what came out as theoretical recommendation
was a mix of opening position backsolving/minimax and
statisticis; see eg here :
http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... 31&t=55569
and here:
http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... 17&t=55569
So ideally in a certain position, the 'best' book
move to play would follow from an algorithm comparing
the bookmoves according to eg 'value' + 'c'(posstat-50)/100
with 'value' the minimaxed openingposition value (eg 0.12 pawn)
and posstat the statistical results in a Gm/compgames base
eg 63.3 = 63.3 pct (with the usual b/w/ chessbase calculation)
with c, preferably also taking into account statistics reliability
eg (1 - 1/nrofgames); a new element, which i now propose..
A bit technical the above i admit, so maybe i should rewrite and
copy it in the subforum here about compchess *programming*.
Because of the statistics element the program would also
need a database, and then it becomes like a GUi again..
Chessbase with their livebook could already work on
such a system, (averaging the positional score in the
lets check analysis for various engines, and then also
use some statistics eg from the live book or other) but
apparenty sofar they do not seem to be interested in such
'theoretical' computerchesstechnicalities unless it would
have commercial benefits i suppose.. So next candidate
then might be Arena, but progress there seems slow
in recent years, is my impression.
ah well, in the meantime i consider running some testgames
probably rapid time control with a big Schroder book on
Arena vs Brainfish, and my personal ChessPartner book
vs Brainfish, and maybe inform you about the results
(it will be anyway some good games to load into my CP
book again, keeping things /opeing moves up to date..).
jef
PS nowadays with top engines i think you can create
quite decent books compared with GM books; the best
opening moves however are played in top correspondence
chess, eg on ICCF, where also computers can be used.
PS2 [quote="Ozymandias"]
A similar tool has been available already for quite some time, commercially. Both Chess Openings Wizard Professional as well as ChessOK Aquarium, offer back-solving and iDea respectively[/quote]
yes, and Bookbuilder ofcourse
www.bookbuilder.nl
Recently updated the book, now on basis of Komodo10,
and comparing with Brainfish in some variations (eg
Sicilian Najdorf) it looks to me i got better results.