Moyo Go Studio DevBlog

Translating the Chinese names took days of hard work, and I still didn’t manage to do the ones with morwe than 3 characters. I discovered that almost all names I had translated belonged to amateurs, so I later deleter more than a hundred games.

I found a couple of name lists on the web and used them for the auto-transliteration stage.

One thing Mace Lee already mentioned is that some Chinese-spelled names actually belong to Korean players, so the phonetic Chinese still needs to be matched to a slightly differently phoneticized Korean name. I am slowly learning the names of the well-known players..

I’ve been “SGF hunting” as well, making the net result of my efforts of the past weeks a net gain of around 1000 games, totalling some 49350 19×19 pro-pro games. After the illlustrious secret Nihon-Kin collection, easily the largest pro-game collection in the world. And pretty accurate too, after spending days of disambiguating alternatively-spelled names. That work is likely not completely finished yet (and I hope I did not make mistakes). GoBase lists AKA’s, but I hardly used them. The database looks very different now, with zero games that have only Chinese-spelled names and just a few games where one players’ name still is Chinese. And literally hundreds of slightly-differently-spelled names are now unified, making it finally practicable to search for a player and get ALL his/her games. I am making the search functions more robust too: Automatic substitution of the “normalized” name when you specify a known “misspelling”. For some players, Moyo Go will know over ten alternative spellings, and that’s excluding the Chinese ones!

About the new SGF collection: It’s being exported as SGF’s now. For some reason that takes 20 hours or so, no idea why the SQL database I use is so sluggish with compressed fields. They aren’t even encrypted, for crying out loud.

Another feature I’m making for MoyoGo 2008 is the automatic display of the Gobase biography of a player when you right-click the name. I bet that this feature will become standard in all serious Go software.

For those who are still reading: Do you think I should make that game database a free download? Because even though I am at the receiving end of a lifelong boycot for all and any Go products I will ever make due to me using previously commercialized game records, I still believe game records should be free as in -speech.