On Sat, 10 Jan 2004 00:51:14 +0000, Simon Waters
wrote:
This is an OpenPGP/MIME signed message (RFC 2440 and 3156)
--------------enigE7CDD57EF707188187033C2E
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Peter Sch?fer wrote:
Noah Roberts wrote in message ...
I am interested in how many games are in your databases. I am working
on the design of an OSS database for chinese chess, which currently does
not exist, and would like to know what a reasonable count of games is to
define my types. For instance, if I choose a game index of 16 bits I
have a limit in the 10's of thousands but if I choose an index of 32
16 bits are certainly not sufficient, 32 bits are be OK.
Storing a complete game takes some hundred bytes, so I wouldn't
waste too many thoughts about saving 1 or 2 bytes ;-)
I think the problem being hit these days on the desktop is ye-olde 32
(or 31 more usually) bit file pointer limit.
32 bit indexes give you 4 billion games. Which I think is unlikely to be
exceeded in the near future.
But if each game is 100 bytes - and you use 32 bit file pointers that's
only 4GBytes, or ~40 million games, per file and you probably don't want
to code for handling multiple files in the database. Which for western
chess is probably getting close or exceeded.
The 40 million game limit might be close to being reached if every
game of chess that has been played so far were recorded. In practice
a database that had all master (or otherwise important) games ever
recorded would probabbly be at the 4-5 million games level today.
[The largest database I have heard mentioned here is about 3.5 million
games.] A conservative estimate for the growth rate is is about
300,000 games per year. [As a calibration, a little over 71,000 games
were added to TWIC in 2002.] This suggests that a 40 million limit
won't be reached for about 100 years.
Some languages expect you to ask nicely if you want files bigger an 2GB,
as do some OSes, but this will change quickly.
--------------enigE7CDD57EF707188187033C2E
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQE//0yDGFXfHI9FVgYRAnCKAJ9sXwJ2e0r5ab8ZUhKnIl4LfP6rhwC eMR4V
P3tWD960XF9Hlz7nS5gcxnk=
=FWve
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--------------enigE7CDD57EF707188187033C2E--