[Wylug-announce] Guinness World Record distributed chess attempt

[Kenneth Geisshirt]

The technical conference NordU/USENIX 2004 will host the ChessBrain
project's attempt to establish a world record for the "Largest number of
distributed computers used to play a single game of chess". ChessBrain
is the world's first distributed network of computers which work
together to play chess. The human opponent will be the Danish
grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen, who became grandmaster at an age of 21.
Peter Heine Nielsen is in the top 100 of chess players (currently 53rd 
in the world).

The Chessbrain software (http://www.chessbrain.net) works a bit like the
SETI at home (Search for ExtraTerrestial Intelligence) client - where 
people's home computers, each work on a small partition of the overall 
computing problem. You can join the record attempt, by registering at 
the ChessBrain website.

Humans playing against computers, are not a new thing. In 1997 the IBM 
built computer Big Blue, won over the world champion Garry Kasparov in a 
series of 6 chess games. What is different here, is the fact, that 
several computers are working in union, with one goal: To be the best 
chess computer, ever built!

The World Record Attempt will take place on Friday, January 30th at the
NordU USENIX 2004 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.


About the NordU conference
--------------------------

The NordU conference brings together researchers, practitioners,
system administrators, system programmers, developers and other
interested in the latest advances in operating systems, Open/Free
software, Linux, BSD, Solaris, security and interoperability. For 5
years the NordU conference has been one of the leading conferences and
forums for system administrators and UNIX professionals to meet, learn,
and exchange ideas on every aspect of computer and network management
in the Nordic countries.


Highlights
----------

This year the keynote speakers are Wietse Venema (author of the open
source mail server "Postfix" and "TCP wrappers"), Illiad (authoring the
comic strip "User Friendly") and Peter H. Salus (UNIX historian and 
former Executive Director of the USENIX Association). Among the many 
technical talks you'll find notable developers such as David Axmark 
(MySQL), Eric Allman (Sendmail), and Howard Chu (OpenLDAP).

Before and after the conference a number of tutorials will be offered.
Among others, you can learn about the Python programming language, Perl 
6, the internals of the FreeBSD kernel, How to build a Linux cluster and 
the advanced features of PostGreSQL.

More information about this years conference, can be found at the
conference website http://www.nordu.org/NordU2004/.
Registration is still open.

Links
-----
http://www.nordu.org/NordU2004/ - The NordU Conference
http://www.chessbrain.net/ - ChessBrain software
http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/ - BigBlue 1997 match

Contacts
--------
Kenneth Geisshirt, Programme Chair, kenneth at geisshirt.dk, +45 4058 2178
Martin Wahlén, Papers Coordinator, mva at df.lth.se
Carlos Justiniano, ChessBrain Founder, cjus at chessbrain.net

-- 
Kenneth Geisshirt, M.Sc., Ph.D.         http://kenneth.geisshirt.dk
Grøndals Parkvej 2A, 3. sal                    kenneth at geisshirt.dk
DK-2720 Vanløse                                     +45 38 87 78 38