End of 2029: Twice as many engines will be freely available as there are today!

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi there,

the number of engines is growing disproportionately. By the end of 2029, there will probably be twice as many engines available as there have been since the beginning. It is possible that 10 new engines are added to sites like GitHub every day. In the long term, even the most dedicated engine enthusiasts will lose track.

There will then probably be 100 times more engines than people who like them and are still officially contributing tests.

In the field of GUIs ...
Situation can be the same.
At the moment many new GUIs are available.

Well, that will ultimately be good for our hobby, but messages about engines, error reports, and other things will become fewer and fewer when there is hardly more than perhaps one person working with a still very unknown engine.

It's a shame that many users in the community will then focus more and more on well-known programs, mostly programs in the TOP 10. This will result in a very limited view, but no one, not even a group of 10 people, can deal with so many engines.

To process all this, we need a community or forum with at least 30 times more users who are also happy to write interesting posts about engine diversity. I find it extremely boring to always read about the same engines from the TOP 10.

I'm very excited to see where this all leads.

Best
Frank

PS:
If 20 engines from Greenland are available ... I think I gave it up to count how many engines are playing on the level from Shredder 13. Perhaps 5.000 in the year 2035?

[towforce]

Probably around 25 years ago, I discovered that amateur musicians upload music to KVR Audio, and that it could be freely downloaded free of copyright. Some of this music was really good, and I was excited to tell a few people - some of whom were grateful. What happened next was that the kids all started downloading copyrighted music for free. Neither myself nor anyone I know now visits KVR Audio.

On YouTube most videos get a handful of views, while a small proportion get huge numbers - many over a billion.

In a world of too much choice, most people either go for a brand name or for the supermarket's own label products.

In the case of computer chess, I go for the "supermarket own label" option: well over 50% of my computer chess usage is at chess.com, which is more than good enough for most of my needs. I am still interested in developments in the field, though - and I feel that following it from the 8-bit armies to the present day has given me a privileged insight into how the chatbot world will develop in the post ChatGPT 3.5 (November '22) period.