Introducing a Lichess Study of the ATOMIX Opening Book, by JoelH and others
This site (possibly among others) contains a copy of an opening book used to train one of the earliest variant chess engines, specifically for atomic chess, the ATOMIX engine, developed in 1996(!)
Essentially, this is a historical artifact of atomic chess. Probably its first ever resource, although the content is, frankly speaking, questionable. For good reason. It was material to train a computer, not a human. More on which later.
Yet it has only been publicly available as a book, and when I decided to explore it I was put off by that fact.
Nope. I'm just kidding. As if a wall of text would stop me from satisfying my curiosity.
Since my best method of understanding the entire thing was to, well, play it out, I decided to assemble a Lichess Study, complete with annotations, variation names, and all. Here is the study. This was a gargantuan piece of work, taking about 2 months to completely compile.
Having gone through the entire file, what's my opinion of it? Well, the most important fact is that this is an opening book for a bygone era. Obviously one must consider the fact that it was meant to help the ATOMIX engine, not us, and from that perspective a few decisions are clear. There is universal agreement on the reason for the purposeful inclusion of bad lines - they were supposed to teach the engine examples of what was "bad" in atomic, and the appropriate counterplays, although this introduced the risk that ATOMIX would play those lines instead.
The more insightful observation is that atomic has progressed heavily since this book came out. If you search carefully, a handful of lines (I cannot precisely recall) which are supposed to be winning for one side are now recognized to be wins for the other, which is only possible to confirm thanks to the Fairy-Stockfish engine included with Lichess. This is not to draw away attention from the fact that this book is in itself remarkable in a way — people were dreaming up chess engines for a new variant in the late 90s!
