Hydra

Hydra may refer to:

Astronomy

Brands and company names

People

Places

Popular culture

Comics and animation

Hydra (chess)

Hydra was a chess machine, designed by a team with Dr. Christian "Chrilly" Donninger, Dr. Ulf Lorenz, GM Christopher Lutz and Muhammad Nasir Ali. Since 2006 the development team consisted only of Donninger and Lutz. Hydra was under the patronage of the PAL Group and Sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi. The goal of the Hydra Project was to dominate the computer chess world, and finally have an accepted victory over humans.

Hydra represented a potentially significant leap in the strength of computer chess. Design team member Lorenz estimates its FIDE equivalent playing strength to be over Elo 3000, and this is in line with its results against Michael Adams and Shredder 8, the former micro-computer chess champion.

Hydra began competing in 2002 and played its last game in June 2006. In June 2009, Christopher Lutz stated that "unfortunately the Hydra project is discontinued." The sponsors decided to end the project.

Architecture

The Hydra team originally planned to have Hydra appear in four versions: Orthus, Chimera, Scylla and then the final Hydra version – the strongest of them all. The original version of Hydra evolved from an earlier design called Brutus and works in a similar fashion to Deep Blue, utilising large numbers of purpose-designed chips (in this case implemented as a field-programmable gate array or FPGA). In Hydra, there are multiple computers, each with its own FPGA acting as a chess coprocessor. These co-processors enabled Hydra to search enormous numbers of positions per second, making each processor more than ten times faster than an unaided computer.

Hydra (Within Temptation album)

Hydra is the sixth studio album by Dutch symphonic metal band Within Temptation. It was released on January 31, 2014 in Europe and on February 4, 2014 in North America. The album contains guest appearances by singer Howard Jones (ex-Killswitch Engage), rapper Xzibit, metal vocalist Tarja Turunen (ex-Nightwish) and alternative rock singer Dave Pirner (Soul Asylum). The first single, "Paradise (What About Us?)", was released on September 27, 2013, and featured Turunen as guest vocalist. The second single, "Dangerous", was released on December 20, in which Jones provided the male vocals.

This is the first album by Within Temptation to be recorded with three guitarists, with Stefan Helleblad making his Within Temptation studio debut on Hydra since his addition to the band shortly after the release of The Unforgiving in 2011. Hydra is also the first Within Temptation album to feature Robert Westerholt's growling techniques since the band's debut album, Enter.

Background and composition

Anna (Disney)

Princess Anna of Arendelle is a fictional character who appears in Walt Disney Animation Studios' 53rd animated film Frozen. She is voiced by Kristen Bell as an adult. At the beginning of the film, Livvy Stubenrauch and Katie Lopez provided her speaking and singing voice as a young child, respectively. Agatha Lee Monn portrayed her as a nine-year-old (singing).

Created by co-directors Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck, Anna is loosely based on Gerda, a character of the Danish fairytale The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen. In the Disney film adaptation, Anna is depicted as the princess of Arendelle, a fictional Scandinavian kingdom and the younger sister of Princess Elsa (Idina Menzel), who is the heiress to the throne and possesses the elemental ability to create and control ice and snow. When Elsa exiles herself from the kingdom after inadvertently sending Arendelle into an eternal winter on the evening of her coronation, fearless and faithful Anna is determined to set out on a dangerous adventure to bring her sister back and save both her kingdom and her family.

Anna (singer)

Anna (born Anna Cote-Wursler on July 9, 1987) is a singer of the group Bon-Bon Blanco. She has five brothers and is the youngest sibling in the family. She uses Anna in her solo efforts, but she uses her real name when part of the band. She was born in Tokyo, Japan, but she has American citizenship.

Her husband is Japanese baseball player Manabu Mima.

External links

Anna (ship)

Anna was a merchant vessel originally employed as a collier taking coal from Yorkshire to London. For her final voyage, she was contracted by the Admiralty to carry additional stores for the squadron of Commodore George Anson on his voyage around the world in 1740–44. She was often referred to as 'Anna Pink', as a 'Pink' is a type of ship with a narrow stern. She lost company with the squadron on 24 April 1741, but rejoined it at the Juan Fernández Islands on 16 August 1741 (Julian calendar) after sheltering for two months in a natural harbour on the South Chilean coast. A subsequent survey found her timbers were too badly damaged for a re-fit, therefore her stores and crew were distributed about the squadron and she was scuttled on 18 August 1742 in Cumberland Bay, Juan Fernández.

By early April 1741, Anson's squadron was rounding the horn and in very bad weather was struggling to make enough westerly to clear Tierra del Fuego. Anna and another ship, Pearl, briefly became separated from the squadron. In this event, orders were to rendezvous at the island of Socorro (now Guamblin Island). By 13 April, she had regained visual contact with the squadron, and that night lookouts on Anna spotted land to the north, which was the western extremity of Isla Noir, off Tierra del Fuego. She fired her gun and set of rocket lights to warn the rest of the squadron, which turned around and beat-off the coast before making more westerly to clear land. This saved the squadron from being wrecked on a lee-shore.