Toolkits: Tool Libraries

by Lon Atkins

Years ago, the draftsmen of every engineering department did work by hand, with pencils and T-square and templates, on drafting boards. Then came CAD (Computer Aided Design). Computers stored drawings in digital format under change control, performed checks automatically against tolerances and other standards, etc. When computers came to chess, the revolution that helped typical chess players most was database technology. Large collections of master games could be searched for specific opening or endgame patterns. Now this revolution is coming of age for go players.

Last column I talking about authoring a personal fuseki/joseki book, using publishing tools, for the twin purposes of "learning through teaching" (which is what writing a book amounts to) and obtaining a portable record of my research. A lot of hard work goes into research, but without go databases the job would be all but impossible for an amateur like me with only limited time for hobbies. Joseki books are wonderful starting points. They explain why hard moves are made. But books of any sort are only as current as the day they go to press. What are the pros playing today? How do most games continue? What's the overall track record for your pet variation?

There are several go databases out there, but let's consider two here. MasterGo from Slate & Shell (find it at www.mastergo.com) installs on your computer with a huge database of games (more than 18,000 at present, I believe, and growing fast). The advantage of a local database is that you can access it quickly, which is important when assessing alternate variations. It's also a highly flexible search engine. You can use multiple criteria and pause anytime to examine a game to decide how to continue your research. Master Go has another powerful capability we'll talk about soon.

A second large database is found on the Internet at Jan Steen's www.gobase.org. Jan keeps it current on the various pro tournaments and matches around the world. Because it is continually being updated with new games that are immediately available to the search engine, this Internet-based database is the most current one. However, it's as slow as the net can sometimes be and slightly cumbersome to use.

When I do research, I check both my local database and gobase.org. Often, a couple of games appear in gobase.org that don't appear in my local database, so I download them and then import them locally. This import capability is a powerful feature of Master Go that can keep your local data up to date.

After research is complete, presentation format becomes the issue. I prefer to create custom "booklets" with plenty of commentary and what seems to me an intuitive organization with sidebars and archives (as opposed to a pure tree hierarchy). In other words, I become my own editor and publisher. The toughest part of this effort is creating diagrams. A wonderful new feature in the latest version of the SmartGo games editor (find it at www.SmartGo.com) solves this problem. Diagrams can be exported as EPS or PDF files. You can then pop them into word processing files, or you can add text to the PDF file to build your booklet. (And, used in conjunction with the node capability of SmartGo, you can build tree-style files corresponding to the various booklet chapters.)

Your research can provide valuable byproducts with regard to the printed books in your library * errata sheets and addenda. Even with the most conscientious poorfreading, errors sneak through; and, as I mentioned earlier, a printed book is frozen at a moment in time. What's your reaction when you find a mistake? (Say, a stone is missing from the diagram and "Black to kill" becomes "Can black live?") Of course, you appreciate the extra mental challenge, but do you correct the mistake? I have a friend who marks such errors with a red crayon because it catches the eye. (Then he wonders why pages stick together.) Your method is probably less messy. These days I use a computer to note the errors. I build files with corrected text and diagrams. New ideas in joseki, etc., can likewise be captured on computer and then appear in print as addenda sheets. Each file name is the name of the target book. Each printed page is sized to fit nicely inside the book. I print the book name and page number on each sheet, in case they accidentally flutter out. They tell me where they belong. If I lose an errata sheet, or give one away to a fellow go player who likes the idea, it can be reprinted quickly. Computers and modern software sure are powerful tools!

If you can get both of these superb cybertools, do so. Would a carpenter start work with a hammer and no saw?

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