Forum for Shusaku Number
Automating Shusaku Numbers via KGS [#696]
It occurs to me that the KGS game database could be used to very easily calculate Shusaku numbers for all KGS players. Create a table with just player handle and Shusaku number fields. Set all the Shusaku numbers to null (in lieu of infinity) Pick a few players with certain and well-documented Shusaku numbers and input those numbers into the table. Then go through in a loop, one player at a time. For each player, look at all their game opponents' Shusaku number, if any. If there is one, set the player's Shusaku number at one plus the lowest such number. Keep the loop going until it goes through once without changing.
Is the games database easy to access from the outside?
Automating the Shusaku Number is just automating the creation of a ![[ext]](images/extlink.gif)
rooted tree, where Shusaku is the root of the tree, from a set of connections (games). The same problem arises in using Web of Trust signing systems. There is software 2 3 4 to create such diagrams. A little bit of Perl work is required to make the software grab a list of games for a particular player from a go server, add in the connections, iterate for all players not seen before.
The games database is easily accessed from the web.
Each national federation would be well advised to create, analyze and locate area/reagions that are only weakly connected and strive to pair people from weakly connected areas in the yearly congress.
Sounds good, though I don't know how to use PERL to grab a player's data. I was sort of hoping there was a conventional database way of doing it. Is the database big?
Velobici: Perl is very easy, but Ruby or any other scripting language should work fine. Please check with WMS before doing this. Also, build pauses into the system, so that it waits some seconds after pulling each web page. You dont want to launch a denial of service attack on the website inadvertantly.
Dudzik: Ran into this thread and decided to throw something together in Ruby. It works, although I certainly haven't run it for very long yet, stopping it after a dozen usernames or so. Just dropped an email to WMS to discuss some of the potential problems.
If I get the go-ahead, I'm thinking of rolling this into a Rails app, making it easy for anyone to find, say, the shortest path between two players.
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