Saturday 5 March 2016

More chess visualisation

I've always been attracted to novel visualisations of data, especially as now it is part of my current job (pretty graphs showing how much spam people complain about). So when it is combined with chess, I have an extra fascination.
Over at blog.ebemunk.com there is quite along article with some very nice chess graphs. Based on around 2,000,000 games from million base, there are graphs to do with openings, how games end, lengths of games, material balances etc
The first graph that jumped out at me was th efrequency of openings. Instead of the usual histogram, the article showed a circular graph, which is better at representing relative popularity (and it had pretty colours). Another interesting set of data was the length of games, where clear spikes at move 40 and move 60 probably tell the tale of mad scrambles to reach time control, before realising your position is in ruins!
So if you want to look at some interesting data, and see if it matches your experiences, just click on the link above.

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