Hacker News Reader

Comment by apetresc | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Interesting, I hadn't heard of this. Their blog post on this is a good read. PGN uses 47.5 bits/move, while their move ordering/Huffman coding implementation uses 4.4 bits/move.

https://lichess.org/blog/Wqa7GiAAAOIpBLoY/developer-update-2...

I'm not convinced. Why would you read the file in a text editor instead of loading it into ChessBase or a similar program?

Maybe they can read the game faster than it would play on screen? Like the difference between a video and its transcript?

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.

Oh, you're not wrong. I didn't mean to imply that chess players read PGN files cold. They definitely load it into Chessbase for actual use.

But I'm just saying it's a nice QoL feature to be able to paste a PGN into an e-mail or load it up in your text editor and just be able to, at a glance, get info like who the players were, how the game ended, how long it was, etc. Often that's the thing you need to decide if this is a file you want to load into Chessbase in the first place.

It's not a killer feature or critical use-case, but it is good ergonomics and you're not going to supplant PGN with some binary encoding just because it's a few kilobytes smaller because of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com