I've done some chess playing on the computer as I mentioned before. For chess computer files there are two sorts of very commonly used public formats.

One is pgn portable game notation. The other is FEN Forsyth-Edwards Notation.

pgn is more a format for storing games (or game fragments). The entries in the files are game data (Player names, rating, date, etc) and a list of moves. This seems to be very similar to sgf.

FEN is different in that it is just a quite compact way of representing a position on the board. It includes things like whose move it is, castling rights, etc.

Now it seems to me the problem with translating this notion to go is that your position statement is going to look a lot like your move list statement. So there may not be much of a way to compactify the info.

So just a question to find out if any super smart person has found a way to do this, or if there is a simple way to copy and paste a game position rather than a whole game.

sgf can store both game records and position setup.
http://www.red-bean.com/sgf/

there's an ascii diagram format for showing game positions
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=226

Thanks for the links!




Interesting, I will have to dig into that website a bit.




Thanks for the tip. I have started messing around with some of the board tags and whatnot.

It's possible that I'm partly confusing the functionality of programs like chessbase or chess assistant with the file formats. I will try to learn more.