Searching for BNRKNBRQ

One way to find chess960 web sites and games is to search on the string used in the PGN that describes the start position. For example, I once again used the dice-rolling method described in A Database of Chess960 Start Positions to construct a random position and came up with BNRKNBRQ. I plugged that string into a search query and received 'about 57' results for BNRKNBRQ, which the search engine reduced to 14 after eliminating duplicate pages.

It turned out that many of the duplicate pages contained data like 'ID 274: BNRKNBRQ ID 275: BNRKNRQB ID 276: [...]', i.e. a straightforward list of all 960 start positions (SPs). Other pages were more lists of SPs, including my own Chess960 Start Positions and the CCRL's Opening Statistics, both linked on this blog under 'Resources'.

The CCRL page (www.computerchess.org.uk), date stamped 11 February 2010, currently returns a 'File does not exist!' error message, hopefully temporary. The search also returned an older version of the same page date stamped 30 March 2008: Opening Statistics (ccrl.org.uk).

A couple of new sites also popped up -- Chess Fest (64squar.es) and Games in database: Fischer Random 9028 (wildchess.org) -- the first an online play site and the second a database site. I'll look at those sites in another post.