Strange Passion talks
I have created accounts for all registered attendees. Pre-existing accounts have been deleted. The new accounts have a special role that allows access to special features such as the ability to submit and vote on Strange Passion talks, which is now open for business!
For more info on the special Strange Passions talks, please:
- View some info
- View all submitted talks and vote
- Submit a talk!
Show us your creativity and submit some cool passion talks. All registered attendees can submit and vote on the talks! These talks should be short (15 minutes) and non-technical. The highest-rate talks will be chosen to present at the conference and will get a refund on their registration fee.
The crowd favorite at each Strange Passion session will also win a Klein bottle! See the info page for more...
Playing Chess with
Playing Chess with God?
Solving "the Chess problem" with a computing program has been a pursuit of many celebrated computer science projects. Back in the 1970s, Ken Thompson - original designer of Bell Labs' UNIX Operating System - developed a hardware-assisted chess machine named "Belle" that nearly achieved a USCF master rating. In the mid 1990s, IBM research wrote a program named "Deep Blue" that actually defeated world Chess champion Gary Kasparov in a celebrated challenge match. Under the hood, the best achieving chess machines are based on a brute force "best next move on the game tree" search. Chess has an amazingly large game tree -- at least 10^43 nodes make up the event space of potential competitive games. Given the amazing explosion of computing resources since 1995, how close are we to writing a computer program that only God could play competitively? Interestingly, Ken Thompson still keeps a link to this exact musing on his home page ( see http://plan9.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/ken/ ) ... I think a strange passion session would be an interesting place to continue this musing.
That does indeed sound like
That does indeed sound like an interesting talk!