Hydra

Hydra may refer to:

Astronomy

Brands and company names

People

Places

Popular culture

Comics and animation

Hydra (film)

Hydra (also known as Hydra: The Lost Island) is a 2009 low-budget monster movie by Andrew Prendergast and Peter Sullivan, which blends elements of horror, thriller and classical mythology. It was made for cable TV and subsequently internationally distributed on DVD.

Plot

Young archaeologist Dr. Valerie Cammon (Polly Shannon) and her colleague Dr. Kim (Philip Moon) go by ship to a volcanic island in the Mediterranean sea. While she seeks relics in a cave, a seaquake sinks their ship without survivors. At about the same time all archaeologists except for Dr. Cammon get eaten by the re-awakened ancient Lernaean Hydra.

During the tempest, a whole island disappears. Two months later, Vincent (Alex McArthur) and Dixie Camden (Jana Williams) intended to organize a man-hunt for cranky millionaires. Their Captain (Michael Shamus Wiles), unaware of the Hydra, suggests the nearby, aforementioned island as a substitute.

Four ex-convicts, Tim Nolan George Stults), Gwen Russell (Dawn Olivieri), Bob Crick (James Wlcek) and Ronnie Kaplan (Texas Battle), are marooned at the shore and given 24 hours' headstart.

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.

Tilt

Tilt may refer to:

Music

Film and television

Photography

Games and sport

Tilt (French magazine)

Tilt was a French magazine which began publication in September 1982, focused on personal computer and console gaming. It was the first French magazine specifically devoted to video games. The headquarters of the magazine was in Paris.

The name of the magazine was a nod to the pinball term, where excessive nudging of a pinball machine would result in a "tilt" penalty, and the loss of a turn during gameplay. The final issue of Tilt was published January 1994.

References

External links

Tilt (TV series)

Tilt is a U.S. TV series set against the backdrop of the (fictional) World Championship of Poker tournament in Las Vegas, and with the tagline "You're playing poker. They're playing you." The series first aired on January 13, 2005, and is the second original drama series from ESPN, following Playmakers. It was created by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, who co-wrote the poker-themed feature film Rounders.

The series title refers to being "on tilt", which is poker jargon for letting frustration or other emotional stress interfere with one's poker-playing judgment. While that term is applicable to any form of poker, only one form of the game—no-limit Texas hold'em—is featured in the series. This was presumably meant to capitalize on the growing popularity of no-limit hold'em in the mid-2000s (decade), which was due in part to ESPN's own coverage of the annual World Series of Poker (WSOP), the event upon which the "World Championship of Poker" depicted in Tilt is presumably based.