Some reflection on writing

Writing is awesome. It allows you to clear your mind, your thoughts, your ideas by forcing you to think about them properly and write about them, speak about them. Writing has been such an influential tool in dissemination over millenia that I think we must continue writing, maybe not to spread ideas, but for the sake of writing, for the sake of clarity. A written paragraph is the purest of thoughts.

Last december, I decided to create a chess engine (still in progress). The project came a quite long way, and in february, I decided to write a blog about these chess computers' history and the theory behind them. I've read and researched so much about them: the theories created in the '50s, Deep Blue, Stockfish, Fisher random... I probably used up all of the credit that my library allows me to borrow books (kinda-surprisingly, a lot of stuff related to chess theory is in German). Well, you might say, then where is the blog? I wish I'd be able to give you the link, but unfortunately I can't. That post has grown too out of hand. It's currently sitting at 4358 words and 25,398 characters. What's more, I'm still yet to write a big chunk of it; I'm still yet to mention alpha-beta pruning, NNUE, and the history after Deep Blue — there is so much to cover. The last commit on my chess engine's repo says new blog coming soon... four months ago.

While I hope that I can finish that post one day, I realised that I shouldn't think about writing to be creating huge posts articles that are simultaneously funny, interesting, thought-provoking, and well structured. It's just not possible to have all of those features and also have fun while writing. I felt and still feel like being forced upon writing it.

Also, it's horrifying to know that I won't be able to compete with what an AI can write in mere seconds compared to my post that I've been working on for the last couple months. I haven't even dared to ask ChatGPT to write about that topic, because I'm scared of the result: all the time I've spent researching, writing, thinking being a waste. Even this post, I could've given a couple poorly worded sentences to an AI, and it would've created something far more eloquent, concise, and meaningful in fraction of the time it's taking me to write these paragraphs.

From now on, I'm going to think about writing for me. I'm going to write because only I want to write. This doesn't mean that these paragraphs are going to be ungrammatical or poorly strucutred, they're just going to be my human thoughts, nothing else.