Reading from a file quickly

I'm trying improve my C++ connect four game by having it "learn" from its mistakes. To do this I'm gonna have it write to a file certain positions and how it handled them wrong so it doesn't make the same mistake twice. Since after awhile the number of positions will be increasing, I want the program to be able to read from the file quickly or else all of its calculations will get bogged down. Anyone know if there is a way to decrease file reading times, like possibly writing and reading in binary?

Read the file at the beginning of the program into a data structure, then you can read from that structure very quickly. The only slowdown would be at the beginning, before the game starts.

-Prelude

Use a database. You can add your records into the database and then query it (which is very fast) for your previous records. The nice thing is that you can get get recordsets that match similar games so you don't have to load the entire file into memory.

You can do a search for a posting by my with a similar title and find a link to how to do this using CDaoDatabase and CDaoRecordset.

My friend did this for a chess program once! Like Prelude said; Read the file into some data structure at the begining of the program (onto the heap), where it can quickly be accessed during execution

Thanks all! Truth is I got about halfway through writing that post when the exact same thought occurred to me and I went, duh! But I posted anyways because I was curious of the answer! Just out of curiosity, IS there anyway to speed up file reading and writing to a text file?

>Just out of curiosity, IS there anyway to speed up file reading and writing to a text file?
Not really, reading and writing to a file is a slow operation. It's like memory allocation, it's slow, so instead of making several requests, you get a lot of memory with one call to improve performance. When using files its faster to read everything all at once instead of bit by bit. Beat the speed disadvantage through good design.

-Prelude