Wednesday, February 08, 2006

The Avalanche Effect

Li Ang (3p) and Li Yue (6d) of www.aygoschool.com have generously donated their entire private game collection!

This altruism should benefit the Go community, so I have been writing some code that adds the handicap property when needed and a few other things that standardize the data. The player's names are in Simplified Chinese, but Moyo Go displays that just fine when you enable it in Windows, and Jean-Pierre Vesinet is working on an auto-romanization database for the CJK languages. I am building a new pro collection in which the Simplified Chinese is converted to UTF-8 (Unicode), so all SGF readers that support that will be able to display the names correctly. As an aside: I intend to make a free SGF Editor available Real Soon Now™.

In about a day or two I expect to be able to make available for download the new collection, which might end up with well over 43,000 pro games :)