Thinking Machine Plays Chess (and shows its thought processes to you) 

If you like chess, or just cool websites, here is one for ya.

From the website:

Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer's thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.

Check this out whether you fancy yourself a proficient chess player or not. It's really cool!

Here's a cool site that is appropriate for this time of year.

An Easter Egg means one thing to kids at Easter. It means something entirely different to certain computer geeks. Often, software programmers will build into their code some special, hidden functionality that can only be seen when certain key combinations or character strings are entered into the program. The Easter Egg Archive is the definitive repository for all things Easter Egg.

Video games, productivity software, even hardware, movies, books, art...almost anything created by an artist or programmer can have hidden Easter eggs.

Some of my favorites are the pinball game in Microsoft Word (97 version), and the bouncing balls in Adobe Audition 1.5.

Happy Easter everyone!

Hometown Boy Scout Makes Good (Eagle Scout Project) 

This is a cool story. Boy Scouts have to plan and carry out a major community project as the last step of earning their Eagle rank, the highest rank in Boy Scouts and a major lifetime coup.

These projects have to be community-oriented, and the boy must not do it all himself. He must solicit donations, if money is required, and assistance from other Scouts, friends and citizens of the local and world community. In short, he is learning project management, something that all teenage boys could benefit from.

Here is a story about a boy that had a rather unique idea for his project, and he pulled it off.

Scour [skou^uhr, skou-er]

- verb.

...to clear or rid of what is undesirable

...to search through or over thoroughly

Scour takes your search terms and retrieves the best results from all three of the major search engines...Yahoo, Google and MSN. So what's so cool about that? Well, nothing if that was all there was. But there's more.

For those of us that spend a lot of time searching the internet for all kinds of weird and wonderful things, a search engine that actually pays you to search is a veritable goldmine. Scour does just that.

For each search you do, and when you vote and/or comment on the vaildity of your results, you earn points. Set Scour as your home page in all your browsers, log in and have it save your login. Then just do the things you normally do. The upper right corner of your page shows a running total of your search points.

When you get enough points, simply cash out and you will receive a gift card you can use anywhere.

You can also refer your friends to Scour and earn points on their searches. So if you click on the links in this post, I will earn a few points for your searches. I think that's pretty cool. What do you think?

You can participate in the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. At Home. That's right, the SETI @ Home project is one of over two dozen distributed computing projects that you can participate in from home, office, laptop. You will be donating otherwise unused clock ticks from your computer to assist in analyzing data collected from various sources. The power of tens of thousands of PCs working on a project that might only have a few hours a week of university mainframe computing time available can make all the difference in the world when it comes to finding life elsewhere in the universe, or curing terminal diseases.