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

Venus (Frankie Avalon song)

"Venus" is a song written by Ed Marshall and Peter DeAngelis. The most successful and best-known recording of the track was done by Frankie Avalon and released in 1959 (see 1959 in music).

Background

Venus became Avalon's first number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, where it spent five weeks atop the survey. The song also reached number ten on the R&B chart. The song's lyrics detail a man's plea to Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, to send him a girl to love and one who will love him as well. Billboard ranked it as the No. 4 song for 1959.

The song was covered in the United Kingdom by Dickie Valentine who spent a week at number 20 in the Singles Chart in May 1959, the week before Frankie Avalon reached the Top 20 with his original version.

In 1976, Avalon released a new disco version of "Venus". This helped revive the singer's career, as his success had been waning prior to its release and was Avalon's last Billboard Hot 100 hit. The re-recording of "Venus" peaking at number forty-six and at number one on the Easy Listening chart. Avalon was quoted describing the remake: "It was all right, but I still prefer the original."

Venus (Sirius XM)

Venus is a Sirius XM Radio station playing rhythmic pop from the 2000s through today similar to Pop2K,

Details

Venus is a Rhythmic Top 40 station with an emphasis on current-based Rhythmic Pop/Dance hits from the 2000s and today with recurrents from the 2000s, all commercial-free. The channel replaces Top 20 on 20, which officially signed off on July 16, 2014 at 12:04 AM after 14 years. The first song to be played on Venus was "My Humps" by The Black Eyed Peas. With the launch of Venus, the move will also give Sirius XM two channels with a Rhythmic-focused format, joining The Heat, whose direction favors current-based R&B/Hip-Hop hits.

With the addition of Pitbull's Globalization Radio, which was launched in 2015, Venus has shifted to Rhythmic Pop, allowing Globalization Radio to take on the current Rhythmic/Dance fare, Venus was dropped from the satellites, allowing users can still hear Venus online.

References

External Links

Tannhäuser (opera)

Tannhäuser (full title Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg / Tannhäuser and the Singers' Contest at Wartburg Castle) is an 1845 opera in three acts, music and text by Richard Wagner, based on two German legends; Tannhäuser, the legendary medieval German Minnesänger and poet, and the tale of the Wartburg Song Contest. The story centers on the struggle between sacred and profane love, and redemption through love, a theme running through much of Wagner's mature work.

Composition history

Sources

Wagner wove a variety of sources into the opera narrative. According to his autobiography, he was inspired by finding the story in "a Volksbuch (popular book) about the Venusberg", which he claimed "fell into his hands", although he admits knowing of the story from the Phantasus of Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann's story, Der Kampf der Sänger (The Singer's Contest). Tieck's tale, which names the hero "Tannenhäuser", tells of the minstrel-knight's amorous adventures in the Venusberg, his travels to Rome as a Pilgrim, and his repudiation by the pope. To this Wagner added material from Hoffmann's story, from Serapions-Brüder (1819), describing a song contest at the Wartburg castle, a castle which featured prominently in Thuringian history. Heinrich Heine had provided Wagner with the inspiration for Der fliegende Holländer and Wagner again drew on Heine for Tannhäuser. In Heine's sardonic essay Elementargeister (Elemental spirits), there appears a poem about Tannhäuser and the lure of the grotto of Venus, published in 1837 in the third volume of Der Salon. Other possible sources include Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's play Der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg and Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue, 1819).