Hackers Spawn Web Supercomputer on Way to Chess World Record

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2013

Hi everyone,

This one looks a bit geeky: Hackers Spawn Web Supercomputer on Way to Chess World Record!

Three months ago, Ruan Pethiyagoda didn’t even call himself a computer programmer. But now he’s knee-deep in the Hack Reactor. Based in San Francisco, the Hack Reactor is one of many crash software development courses that seek to teach computer programming through several weeks of complete immersion in code, writes Klint Finley in the Wired.com. 

Pethiyagoda enrolled in the school this past March, and over the past several weeks, he and three other hackers-in-training have teamed with one of the giants of the tech industry — the Pivotal Initiative, the big data spin-off company from EMC and VMware — to approach a new world record for what’s called the N-Queens Problem, a classic math puzzle that plays out on a chess board.

But more importantly, in working to solve this problem, this four-person team — Cameron Boehmer, John S. Dvorak, and Tim Sze, as well as Pethiyagoda — has developed a new breed of software that lets you pool the processing power of potentially thousands of machines just by pointing them to a single website. They call this creation Smidge. It’s a kind of ad hoc supercomputer built with JavaScript, the standard programming language of the web.

Hack Reactor is a place where you learn by practice. When you show up, you’re tossed into a group of other students and you’re all given a common project meant to further your understanding of computer science and engineering. You work 11 hours a day, six days a week.

Though little more than an experiment at this point, the project is yet another way the net is stretching the boundaries of “distributed computing,” where thousands — or even tens of thousands — of machines are pooled together to solve a common task. Popular web outfits like Google and Amazon operate in this way, and these web giants have spawned a whole new breed of distributed software that lets others benefit from the same tricks of the trade.

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Kasparov, Chess to Figure in Meet to Honor Father of Modern Computing Alan Turing

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012


Hi everyone,

Alan Turing

How can the mention of computers and artificial intelligence not have a mention of chess? Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, along with Google Senior Vice-President Dr Vint Cerf, are going to be the leading figures who will celebrate the legacy of Alan Turing in Manchester.

The computer conference to honour the father of the modern computer, hailed as the biggest ever, will be hosted by the University of Manchester from June 22 to June 25.

The event will feature three days of lectures and panel discussions touching upon a wide array of topics – from Turing's legacy in the digital age, to computer science, the nature of human mind and the possibilities and limits of artificial intelligence. The discussions will be accompanied by a computer chess event, a poster session, and a competition of computer programmes proving theorems.

From Alexandra Kosteniuk's
www.chessblog.com
Also see her personal blog at
www.chessqueen.com

Cool chess article about how computers win chess

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2011

Chess fans watch as computer program Deep Blue defeats then-world chess champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997.

Photo: Reuters

Here is a very nice story about computers and chess. It explores the concept of how computers tackle chess. You will enjoy reading it.

Chess is one of humanity's most cerebral activities and devising a machine that could beat us at our own game was a long-standing goal of artificial intelligence.

This goal is generally acknowledged to have been reached in 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue defeated grandmaster and world champion Garry Kasparov. But there is more to the legacy of computer chess than that triumph.

Chess is one of humanity's most cerebral activities and devising a machine that could beat us at our own game was a long-standing goal of artificial intelligence.

The first machine to play chess was unveiled by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1770. It took the form of a man in Eastern garb sitting behind a box on top of which was a chess board. The Turk, as it came to be known, appeared to play its human opponents using nothing but clockwork and toured the world, becoming famous.

But it was all an illusion. A cunningly concealed human operator directed the action on the board, moving the Turk's arm using a system of levers and reading the opponent's moves via magnets.

The Turk did leave us with more than a good story, though, for it is believed to have helped inspire the development of genuine breakthroughs from the power loom to the telephone.

For a machine that could really play chess the world had to wait for the computer age. Computing heavyweights like Alan Turing were obsessed with chess even before computers were powerful enough to play it. Chess has simple, well-defined rules but is also difficult to play well so it was seen as a good test for the fledgling field of artificial intelligence.

The key to success in chess is to look ahead at the consequences of different moves and counter-moves. The problem is that there are a lot of possibilities to examine. For each board position in chess there are on average 35 possible moves that can be made, for each of those an average of 35 counter-moves and so on.

One way to look ahead further is through software tricks that stop the computer going down blind alleys as it considers future moves. Another is fast, specialised hardware. Deep Blue used both when it beat Kasparov in 1997.

Deep Blue could play a mean game of chess – but that is all it could do.

On the other hand it showed that in just 50 years we could go from a standing start to creating a chess-playing machine that outstripped even our best and brightest.

So what's our next move?

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From Alexandra Kosteniuk's

www.chessblog.com

Also see her personal blog at

www.chessqueen.com