Welcome to ChessRoots- a website to visualize massive chess databases. You can use ChessRoots to explore the openings of several databases on an interactive graph. Use the tools at the top of the page to change the dataset or filter it by Elo or time control.
A few months ago I was playing around with processing chess PGNs out of personal interest. After teaming up with a friend who is better at web development, we wanted to find a way to make an interactive opening graph on a website. We came across the massive 800 million game Lichess database and set our ambitions on processing the entire database and using the data to make an interactive graph. The size of the dataset presented several technical challenges that I am going to talk about in this blog, I will start by talking about the algorithm we used to process PGNs in the next post.