Design and evaluation of database and API supporting Shogi learners on the Internet

We have developed a Shogi (Japanese Chess) support system on the Internet, called SAKURA. SAKURA provides an environment for Shogi with game and discussion support functions. It also has databases and interfaces with artificial intelligence to play shogi. The databases of SAKURA consist of a game record database and a position database. These databases have links to each other. As a result, information associated with game positions, such as comments, evaluations, and candidate moves can be integrated on a single system. We have conducted experiments to evaluate the performance of API for the databases. This paper describes SAKURA´s database design and results of the experiment for performance evaluation. The performance is efficient enough to be extensively used by external artificial intelligence.