[HN Gopher] Portable Game Notation Specification and Implementat...
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       Portable Game Notation Specification and Implementation Guide
        
       Author : tosh
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2023-03-21 11:56 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.saremba.de)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.saremba.de)
        
       | fasterik wrote:
       | PGN and especially the use of standard algebraic notation (SAN)
       | is one of my pet peeves in chess programming. SAN is great for
       | humans to read but is annoyingly tricky and less efficient for a
       | computer to parse. PGN files are also huge relative to the amount
       | of information they need to encode. I'm not sure why a human
       | would ever want to read a PGN file.
       | 
       | I'll mention a tool called pgn-extract. It can do lots of things
       | with PGN files. I am primarily interested in using large PGNs of
       | master games to extract opening lines and individual positions.
       | Some features of pgn-extract I have found useful are stripping
       | tags and converting moves to UCI notation (e.g. "g1f3" instead of
       | "Nf3"), and dumping the FEN string of every position in the PGN.
       | 
       | https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/djb/pgn-extract/
        
         | apetresc wrote:
         | The human-readability of PGN is very handy. The kinds of chess
         | players who curate PGN collections can definitely
         | visualize/identify games based on algebraic notation.
         | 
         | A well-formed PGN file is basically just an ASCII scoresheet
         | that every tournament player is required to write out by hand
         | over the course of a game anyway.
        
           | arnsholt wrote:
           | Being human readable is nice, but compared to something like
           | lichess's Huffman based encoding, it's something like an
           | order of magnitude larger than needed. If your reference base
           | is several million games, that really adds up.
        
           | fasterik wrote:
           | I'm not convinced. Why would you read the file in a text
           | editor instead of loading it into ChessBase or a similar
           | program?
        
             | Bjartr wrote:
             | Maybe they can read the game faster than it would play on
             | screen? Like the difference between a video and its
             | transcript?
        
               | fasterik wrote:
               | You can still read the notation on screen in ChessBase.
               | It also makes navigating through the games and searching
               | for specific players and opening lines much easier.
        
       | 867-5309 wrote:
       | (for chess)
        
         | karmakaze wrote:
         | Also (2003) from response "Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 14:16:50 GMT"
         | for "pgn-complete.htm".
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | seabass-labrax wrote:
       | PGN has been a phenomenal success; almost all chess software
       | supports the format, allowing games to be, for instance, recorded
       | in one program and analysed in another. I also wonder if PGN was
       | the 'nail in the coffin' for the (somewhat bizarre) 'descriptive'
       | chess notation, which was popular in the USA until very recently.
        
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       (page generated 2023-03-21 23:02 UTC)