Subject: Guinness World Record distributed chess attempt
========================================================

Copenhagen, January 6th, 2004

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@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@geisshirt.dk, +45 4058 2178
Martin Wahlén, Papers Coordinator, mva@df.lth.se
Carlos Justiniano, ChessBrain Founder, cjus@chessbrain.net