The program plays the first moves of a game from the “Openings book” which comes with it. That is a folder of approximately a million opening positions in which the program finds how frequently specific opening moves have been played and how promising they are.

 

In addition the program can also store in the file its own experiences with opening variations – it learns from its successes and its defeats.

In the program the openings book is also called the “tree of positions” (tree of variations). The files which make it up are quite big – the program requires approx. 70 Bytes per position.

 

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Apart from the hardware resources is there any limitation to the size of the tree of positions? If so, what happens when this is reached?

 

At the moment the limit for the size of the tree is 16 TB. So far, no user has managed to generate a tree of positions of that size. Theoretically nothing happens if the limit is exceeded, but this has not yet been tested in practice.