Go Classified: SGF of Cho’s Encyclopedia of Life and Death Sep 25, 2013 04:00 pm | Chris Garlock
“I’d like to get the SGF for Cho’s Encyclopedia of Life and Death,” writes Merlyn. “Does anyone know about this? I’ve found the PDF online, and I do know that Kiseido used to sell it on a 3.5″ disk.”
As Merlyn promised, I found Cho Chikun's Encyclopedia of Life and Death online it is large collection of Go problems in PDF.
I was able to copy paste the output and arrange it into a board:
!(!(((((((((((((((>
@+!@@+++++++++++++]
!!+!@+++++++++++++]
@+!!@++++*+++++*++]
[@@@@+++++++++++++]
[+++++++++++++++++]
Each character corresponds to an intersection on the board. We can decipher the code:
!= white@= black+= empty*= star point[= left edge]= right edge(= top edge<= top right corner
The next steps in the workflow are scraping the games, writing the SGF files and place in an SGF reader and host.
Google scraping pdf python I found that School of Data, has a tutorial for scraperwiki.
pip install scraperwiki
The scraperwiki library turned the PDF into quite regular XML. In two lines I got the XML
u=file("cho-1-elementary.pdf")
x=scraperwiki.pdftoxml(u.read())
soup = BeautifulSoup(x)
book = soup.get_text().split('\n')
After a short parsing puzzle, you have every problem in the book in ASCII format.
The SGF specification exists for any game: Backgammon, Twixt, Hex. I don't remember the specification for Go with a helpful discussion on make-a-move vs add-a-stone
All KGS games are publicly available. Here are mine, mrcactu5.
Here is problem 6 from the Life and Death Encyclopedia:
(;AB[be][bf][cb][cc][cd][eb]AW[ab][ae][ba][bb][bc][bd]C[problem 6])
One line - it reads on any sgf editor. Then we can join the games together:
((C[game A])(C[game B])(C[game C]))
In this way I printed all 900 problems from Vol 1.