Yes, the rate of progress of Obsidian jets is astonishing.
Yes, it used to be (as Frank wrote) extremely challenging to write an engine with an elo of 2500.
Yes, it used to be (I also refer to what Frank wrote) that creating an online forum was quite a challenge.
Yes, it used to be... But now it is now!
Now is the time of a new era of chess creators, new forms of communication including direct communication, now people have apps on their phone and can go to the toilet with it to react, read, write back, give an emoticon
It used to be in the past. Now it is now.
And this does not mean, in my understanding, that it used to be better. On the contrary - it was harder! At least for me.
I have been a fan of computer chess since the 1990s. It all started when I was a teenager.
When I was finishing school (mechanic), I wanted to write my own chess engine. Although I was not and am not a programmer, within a few weeks I had learned from one book (I still have it to this day) programming in C at such a (low) level that I was able to write a move generator (no bitboard, nothing sophisticated) and then added a simple alpha-beta search plus an embarrassingly weak move evaluation function.
The engine worked and communication was through a Linux terminal. I was using at the time, and it was 2000, a Linux distribution called Gentoo.which I compiled myself. How proud I was of my engine (and also of Gentoo
). The engine he at the level of maximum 1200-1300 Elo and was weak, but... it was mine. I was the one who created it by putting months of my work and heart into it. I was a very young man at the time, I was reaching the age of 20.What was next for my engine. There was nothing. I had to go to work. I started working at a corpo in a 4-shift system often with overtime as well. I was not able to further develop my engine
Why am I writing this?
Because more than 24 years ago, writing a chess engine was quite an achievement considering 100 times less possibility to obtain information, data, literature and also open source engines than it is today. And most importantly, there was no possibility of such easy, fast and - let's not be afraid to say it - fruitful interaction between chess engine developers.
Today there is such a possibility. Today there is discord (or similar solutions), theme servers and masses of people associated in these themes through just such ways of communication that discord makes possible.
Whiskers wrote that the combination of these factors adds up. And I agree with that. The synergy effect: information, data, relationships between developers, speed and ease of communication -> and we have in January 2024 Obsidian, an engine that is probably not yet 1 year old and plays at the level of the best computer competitors. And there are more such (though not the same) Obsidians. But that's not a bad thing.
This is the "price of progress" associated with open source, with openness of information and the development of communication technology.
Discord is just a tool - and it works. There used to be forums and other oldies - and they also worked.
I, for one, am in favor of sharing knowledge. chessengeria is a site aimed at popularizing our hobby. In 2024, this is the only thing I have time for between contracts, the strength and the desire to occasionally write an article, do a course or how-to, write about some Oldie Goldie or a rising star of engines that is undoubtedly Obsidian. This is my humble contribution.
And I don't feel like going back to programming anymore after more than 20 years, although it was fun to discover it all
I regret that 24 years ago I did not have such possibilities of communication that exist today, perhaps the story with my engine would have turned out differently.