Howdy,

Some time ago I created an application that collects top hex players' games and presents opening moves frequencies, win ratios and their follow-ups. It was just for fun and learning but I thought that some of you might actually find it interesting and perhaps it could help people understand the game better. So if you have ever wondered which particular move is most often played or which has the highest winning probability, or maybe you would like to see which moves were played in your own games (there is a possiblity to easily download any player's games), here it is:

• if you have Python 3.x installed you can find it on my github page https://github.com/adrzystek/Hex-Fusekipedia
• for those “not into Python” I uploaded the stand-alone version here https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/fusekipedia/Hex+Fusekipedia+v2.5.zip (so you don't need any other program to run it, just unzip and run the .exe file); however, probably it works only on Windows operating system

The app itself is very easy to use and should be intuitive but of course if you have any questions I'll be happy to help.

Cheers,

struggler

Thanks for making this, it looks great.

Just to let you know, bs4 and tkinter are not part of the python standard library, so you may want to update your install instructions.

Gwylim, thank you for the kind words.

And thanks for correcting me - you are totally right about bs4 but I see that tkinter is actually listed in the Python standard library (https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/) - isn't it the truth?

Yeah, sorry, it seems you're right. I was confused because my linux distribution (ubuntu) seems to have split tk to a different package, so I did actually have to install it separately.

That's really cool.  Feel free to add a link to it on hexwiki.net.  Maybe make a release on GitHub and link to that.

Have you considered storing the LG games on your own site and making your program download the games from there?

This is a great application. Some time earlier Matt published a comparable online database for Hex opening moves, but unfortunately it disappeared.  This was the address: matt.stumpnet.net/hexdb.html

• In his user interface the percentages were put on the cells, which gave a more quick impression of the best moves.
• Further he included 2000+ players only. Maybe you could build-in a filter for top-level players?
• As of now there seem to be “only” 3880 games in the db. Do you expect more LG games can be added?

Cheers, Tony

Tony, good news! My website is back up actually: www.mseymour.ca/hexdb.html

The old one was actually on my friend's domain, unfortunately he let his registration lapse. I only got around to getting my own host a few weeks ago.

Cheers

Looks good. One remark though: The swapped and non-swapped games for any given first move should perhaps be merged.

The swapped and non-swapped games are merged when “With swap” is deselected (in that mode it just pretends the swapped move didn't happen for games that had a swap).

Incidentally, there is a bug in www.mseymour.ca/hexdb.html in that games which open in the center are double counted (it says there are 4 games but there are actually only 2 distinct ones). This is because it adds a rotated version of each game to account for symmetry, but a move on the center point is already symmetrical. It seems better to me to rotate each game to one canonical orientation rather than doubling them up, but it could also be fixed just dividing by 2 for that case.

Hmmm, true. Somehow I got the impression that this did not quite work when I tried it both selected and deselected the first time. Thanks.

There is another bug in www.mseymour.ca/hexdb.html in that it always defaults to the “With swap” mode on loading the page, regardless of whether the checkbox is checked (you may need to check and uncheck it to get it to work). This may have been the source of confusion.

I have updated my database with approximately 1900 more games, for about 4500 total. Most of the added games are more recent than the ones that were there previously. I also switched to have swap off by default. Have a look if you're interested.

Hey, so I've implemented a variant of this concept, which instead of calculating win ratios calculates what could be called the “advantage” of each move. This is measured in rating points, and is basically the effective adjustment to a player's rating from starting at a particular board position. I also calculate estimates of the error in this value (the error will be higher where there is less data), so we can have some idea of the statistical significance.

You can try it here: https://gwylim.net/hexgames

It also has 11x11 and 19x19, and I added the ability to filter based on date and rating (the ratings don't correspond exactly to ratings on LG, but are calculated from scratch).

Very nice work Gwylim!

I installed and tryed 1 branch. It's blocked after 5 moves while there is “6 moves in this branch”

I played B2 E6 I5 I10 K10. It says 6 games played K12 but we can't play it.

screen of the app : http://prntscr.com/gxm4rl

Oh we can't EDIT our message. I saw another project like that : http://hex.kosmanor.com/hex-bin/board/11/en_US:0/

But the games recorded are weird…

Nytope,

It seems that anything isn't blocked, simply after these 5 moves there was only one follow-up move - which is listed on the right. Just click on the button with “k12” to browse the game onwards.

Using the opportunity, I've updated the github page about the project (both readme file and the python code) so that now it states that the bs4 package should be installed (thanks Gwylim for the remark). And by the way I'd like to thanks others who expressed their appreciation for my work, I'm happy if this simple thing helped any of you to answer even one question about the game ;)

PS I see that the application was downloaded (with the use of the link I provided) about 50 times which shows that there are indeed a few people interested in the game and its curiosities (nice!).