Shogi maze re-imaged

July 27, 2023 by shogishack

In 2010, I was contacted by members of Shogi France. One of their active members has just created a shogi site with a page that showed variety of opening moves. They offered to include the content in our site as this will nicely compliment with our site pages that explains what piece to move first. (I tried to explain up to first 3 or 4 moves and they were quickly becoming messy!) This site page showed a initial shogi board with possible opening moves. when you click on the board, it will advance to next position and again showed possible next move, until it steps through first 42 moves. The page used database that was from Japan (but the database server was in Europe, I believe). Number of games played was more than 30,000 strong. The page had links to original kifu records (up to twenty) for each move positions. Replay of each game was supported through clever link to original kifu location and use of Kifu for Flash player. I was very impressed with the site so I embedded the site page through the power of <iframe> html element. and included as one of sub-page of “Study room”

Over the time, we switched our site from http to https. iframe-ing http inside https was no longer possible. I removed the iframe but kept a link in the site, knowing people can still jump to the site and study materials.

Bad news is, Although the move navigation part of the site still works today, the Database it was relying on was dismantled years later and Browser support for flash player has also ended. So it was not possible to play those games any longer. Broken links in the original site could become a security concern as well.

I contacted the author of the site and he was generous enough to share the materials that was used to create the original site and authorized me to do whatever I want.

Encouraged with this, I re-created the Shogimaze in our site. Initially I was only going to revive first 42 move variation chart in one page with Ajax and make page rendering a little smoother. However, saved in one of the file folder was a snapshot of game records that was created for EVShogi (palm OS app for replaying shogi game). With a bit of interfacing, I could use these records in our site.

Result is newly revised Shogi maze page here.

It uses a Japanese database (将棋の棋譜でーたべーす) snapshot taken
sometime around 2009. This site/service seems to have disappeared around 2016. Therefore there is no updated data set available.
It still includes 36,373 professionals’, Women professionals’, and high ranking amateur players’ game records.

Since database used is from a decade ago, you do not see any new openings strategy such as new style of Gangi, but this is not only a good source for studying variety of Shogi openings but also a great resource for observing mid-game and end game tactics.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did while re-writing the app.