The database is very cool, but there are lots of things that it doesn't support querying. For example, it would be fun/informative to look for games with weird pawn structures, big material sacrifices for positional advantages, big comebacks, etc.! In order to do this, one would need the actual data for each game and then they could write their own programs (or even query engines, to open it up for non-programmers) to comb through the data. It could be anonymous, and just show which moves were made (ideally it would also include the players ELOs and the time remaining, in seconds, when each move was made). Each game would only be about 80 bytes, pre-compression, and it could be released as a torrent if necessary so that there are no hosting costs.
"The database"? What database? The Explorer? Chessbase?
What practical use do you see for the ability to search for weird pawn structures?
The database is very cool, but there are lots of things that it doesn't support querying. For example, it would be fun/informative to look for games with weird pawn structures, big material sacrifices for positional advantages, big comebacks, etc.! In order to do this, one would need the actual data for each game and then they could write their own programs (or even query engines, to open it up for non-programmers) to comb through the data. It could be anonymous, and just show which moves were made (ideally it would also include the players ELOs and the time remaining, in seconds, when each move was made). Each game would only be about 80 bytes, pre-compression, and it could be released as a torrent if necessary so that there are no hosting costs.