Chess@home Building the Largest Chess AI ever
From the post:
Many people are familiar with the SETI@home project: a very large scale effort to search for patterns from alien civilizations in the ocean of data we receive from the sky, using the computing power of millions of computers around the globe (“the grid”).
SETI@home has been a success, obviously not in finding aliens, but in demonstrating the potential of large-scale distributed computing. Projects like BOINC have been expanding this effort to other fields like biology, medicine and physics.
Last weekend, a team at Joshfire (Thomas, Nathan, Mickael and myself) participated in a 48-hour coding contest called Node Knockout. Rules were simple: code the most amazing thing you can in the weekend, as long as it uses server-side JavaScript.
JavaScript is an old but exciting technology, currently undergoing a major revival through performance breakthroughs, server-side engines, and an array of new possibilities offered by HTML5. It is also the language that has the biggest scale. Any computer connected to the web can run your JavaScript code extremely easily, just by typing an URL in a browser or running a script in a command line.
We decided to exploit this scale, together with Node’s high I/O performance, to build a large-scale distributed computing project that people could join just by visiting a web page. Searching for aliens was quickly eliminated as we didn’t have our own antenna array available at the time. So we went with a somewhat easier problem: Chess.
Easier problem: Take the coming weekend and sketch out how you think Javascript and/or HTML5 are going to impact the authoring/delivery of topic maps.