TITLE: Databases and the Box
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 07, 2008  5:49 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Last time I mentioned
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-10.html#e2008-10-05T20_47_31.htm">
   a Supreme Court justice's thoughts</A>
on how universal access to legal case data changes
the research task associated with the practice of
the law.  Justice Roberts's comments brought to
mind two thoughts, one related to the law and one
not.

As a graduate student, I worked on the representation
and manipulation of legal arguments.  This required
me to spend some time reading legal journals for
two different purposes.  First, I needed to review
the literature on applying computers to legal tasks,
ad in particular how to represent knowledge of
statute and cases.  Second, I needed to find, read,
and code cases for the knowledge base of my program.
I'm not <EM>that</EM> old, but I'm old enough that
my research preceded the Internet Age's access to
legal cases.  I went to the campus library to check
out thick volumes of the <EM>Harvard Law Review</EM>
and other legal collections and journals.  These
books became my companions for several months, as I
lay on the floor of my study and pored over them.

When I could not find a resource I needed on campus,
I rode my bike to the Michigan State Law Library in
downtown Lansing to use law reviews in its collection.
I was not allowed to take these home, so I worked
through them one at a time in carols there.  I was
quite an anomalous sight there, in T-shirt and shorts
with a bike helmet at my side!

I loved that time, reading and learning.  I never
considered studying the law as a profession, but
this work was a wonderful education in a fascinating
domain where computing can be applied.  My enjoyment
of the reading almost certainly extending my research
time in grad school by a couple of months.

The second thought was of the changes in chess brought
about by the application of simple database technology.
I've
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2005-12.html#e2005-12-23T10_19_08.htm">
   written about chess</A>
before, but not about computing applications to it.
Of course, the remarkable advances in chess-playing
computers that came to a head in Hitech and Deep
Thought have now reached the desktop in the form of
cheap and amazingly strong programs.  This has
affected chess in so many ways, from eliminating the
possibility of adjournments in most tournaments to
providing super-strong partners for every player
who wants to play, day or night.  The Internet does
the same, though now we are never sure if we are
playing against a person or a person sitting next
to a PC running Fritz.

But my thoughts turned to the same effect Justice
Roberts talked about, the changes created by
opening databases on how players learn, study, and
stay abreast of opening theory.  If you have never
played tournament chess, you may not be aware of
how much knowledge of chess openings has been
recorded.  Go to a big-box bookstore like Amazon
or Barnes and Noble or Borders and browse the
library of chess titles.  (You can do that on-line
now, of course!)  You will see encyclopedias of
openings like, well, the Encyclopedia of Chess
Openings; books on classes of openings, such as
systems for defending against king pawn openings;
and books upon books about individual openings,
from the most popular Ruy Lopez and Sicilian Defense
to niche openings like my favorites, Petroff's
Defense and the Center Game.

In the olden days of the 1980s, players bought books
on their objects of study and pored over them with
the same vigor as legal theorists studying law
review articles.  We hunted down games featuring
our openings so that we could play through them to
see if there was a novelty worth learning or if
someone had finally solved an open problem in a
popular variation.  I still have a binder full of
games with Petroff's Defense, cataloged using my
own system, variation by variation with notes by
famous players and my own humble notes from unusual
games.  My goal was to know this opening so well
that I could always get a comfortable game out of
the opening, against even stronger players, and
to occasionally get a winning position early against
a player not as well versed in the Petroff as I.

Talk about a misspent youth.

Chessplayers these days have the same dream, but
they rarely spend hours with their heads buried
inside opening books.  These days, it is possible
to subscribe to a database service that puts at
our fingertips, via a computer keyboard, every game
played with any opening -- anywhere in the recorded
chess world, as recently as the latest update a
week ago.  What is the study of chess openings like
now?  I don't know, having grown up in the older
era and not having kept up with chess study in many
years.  Perhaps Justice Roberts feels a little like
this these days.  Clerks do a lot of his research,
and when he needs to do his own sleuthing, those
old law reviews feel warm and inviting.

I do know this.  Opening databases have so changed
chess practice, from grandmasters down to patzers
like me, that the latest issue of <EM>Chess Life</EM>,
the magazine of U.S. Chess, includes a review of
the most recent revision of <EM>Modern Chess
Openings</EM> -- the opening bible on which most
players in the West once relied as the foundation
of broad study -- whose primary premise is this:
What role does <EM>MCO</EM> play in a world where
computer database is king?  What is the use of this
venerable text?

From our gamerooms to our courtrooms, applications
of even the most straightforward computing technology
have changed the world.  And we haven't even begun
to talk about programs.
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