SuperSteve3D

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that seven films remain in the running in the Visual Effects category for the 81st Academy Awards®.

The films are listed below in alphabetical order:

Australia
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Iron Man
Journey to the Center of the Earth
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

On Thursday, January 15, all members of the Academy’s Visual Effects Branch will be invited to view 15-minute excerpts from each of the seven shortlisted films. Following the screenings, the members will vote to nominate three films for final Oscar consideration.

The 81st Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 22, 2009.200

 

Engine

Three engine releases are planned in 2009:

• Rybka 3+ – Rybka 3 playing strength, with bugfixes and cosmetic improvements, for Rybka 3 customers
• Pocket Rybka 3 – published by Convekta/ChessOK, packaged with their Pocket Champion interface, conforms to S. Tsukrov’s Pocket-UCI protocol
• Rybka 4 – better search, better eval, new analysis features

There are no official dates yet. The first two are reasonably close while the third will be in the summer or fall. Other ports (ie. Symbian, or other Pocket PC protocols) are still possible, but nothing concrete is planned yet.

Opening Book

Jeroen has one very innovative product in the pipeline. Things are moving extremely fast right now in this area as we continue to make the shift to general chess study tools. Details will be available shortly.

Tournaments

We’re going to shift our focus a bit. Our tournament goal for 2009 is to win a top freestyle event in 100% automated mode. This involves:

• Continuing work on our cluster, a vital research topic for the near future. The general plan is to augment Lukas’ core hardware with external machines.
• Putting on a great show, with an unprecedented level of chess.
• Showing off unreleased Rybka features and contrasting those with the public Rybka features which are available to our opponents.
• Tapping into the natural interest in man vs machine, which here is man + machine vs machine.

Currently, our sights are set on the InfinityChess ‘Grand Prix 2009’ tournaments – we’ll play openly and transparently there. We would also be interested in other freestyle tournaments and would highly welcome an innovative organizer who can take advantage of this opportunity. For example, I would love to see a round-robin freestyle tournament consisting of past winners of freestyle tournaments, top correspondence players, top over-the-board players (all playing in centaur mode of course), along with our cluster in automated mode. This would be a fantastic show, and would help settle (or maybe reignite) some long-standing debates as well.