Friday, September 29, 2006

Getting Rid Of The Chinese

Moyo Go has by far the biggest game collection but too many games had Chinese names & rank. And even though someone gave me a transliteration list, not too many names got translated. Today I discovered why. The names have stuff behind them, like how old the player was or which country he or she played for. And often the rank.

Naive sod as I am, always believing in the good of humanity, I simply did a literal search and if there was no exact match, I didn't translate a thing. So not much got translated. But a few hours ago I got off my lazy ass, figured out what all that extra crap meant and wrote some code that gets rid of it and converts it into standard SGF rank properties. One of the funny things I discovered that there's no such thing as a 1p rank, it's called "beginning stage" or something.

Tonight I'll start reading in all pro games again. I have two hundred thousand pro game files from many sources. Heaven permitting, after it has all been done, I will have the most complete, Romanized pro game collection. The code that is able to deal with all violations of the SGF standard is humongous.