On the Impact of Information Technologies on Society: an Historical Perspective through the Game of Chess

The game of chess as always been viewed as an iconic representation of intellectual prowess. Since the very beginning of computer science, the challenge of being able to program a computer capable of playing chess and beating humans has been alive and used both as a mark to measure hardware/software progresses and as an ongoing programming challenge leading to numerous discoveries. In the early days of computer science it was a topic for specialists. But as computers were democratized, and the strength of chess engines began to increase, chess players started to appropriate to themselves these new tools. We show how these interactions between the world of chess and information technologies have been herald of broader social impacts of information technologies. The game of chess, and more broadly the world of chess (chess players, literature, computer softwares and websites dedicated to chess, etc.), turns out to be a surprisingly and particularly sharp indicator of the changes induced in our everyday life by the information technologies. Moreover, in the same way that chess is a modelization of war that captures the raw features of strategic thinking, chess world can be seen as small society making the study of the information technologies impact easier to analyze and to grasp

Gardner's Minichess Variant is solved

A 5x5 board is the smallest board on which one can set up all kind of chess pieces as a start position. We consider Gardner's minichess variant in which all pieces are set as in a standard chessboard (from Rook to King). This game has roughly 9x10^{18} legal positions and is comparable in this respect with checkers. We weakly solve this game, that is we prove its game-theoretic value and give a strategy to draw against best play for White and Black sides. Our approach requires surprisingly small computing power. We give a human readable proof. The way the result is obtained is generic and could be generalized to bigger chess settings or to other games

The State of the Art in Hadron Beam Cooling

Cooling of hadron beams (including heavy-ions) is a powerful technique by which accelerator facilities around the world achieve the necessary beam brightness for their physics research. In this paper, we will give an overview of the latest developments in hadron beam cooling, for which high energy electron cooling at Fermilab's Recycler ring and bunched beam stochastic cooling at Brookhaven National Laboratory's RHIC facility represent two recent major accomplishments. Novel ideas in the field will also be introduced.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, ICFA-HB2008 Invited presentatio

Determination of the pure silicon monocarbide content of silicon carbide and products based on silicon carbide

Experience has shown that different methods of analysis of SiC products give different results. Methods identified as AFNOR, FEPA, and manufacturer P, currently used to detect SiC, free C, free Si, free Fe, and SiO2 are reviewed. The AFNOR method gives lower SiC content, attributed to destruction of SiC by grinding. Two products sent to independent labs for analysis by the AFNOR and FEPA methods showed somewhat different results, especially for SiC, SiO2, and Al2O3 content, whereas an X-ray analysis showed a SiC content approximately 10 points lower than by chemical methods

Universal Critical Behavior of Noisy Coupled Oscillators

We study the universal thermodynamic properties of systems consisting of many coupled oscillators operating in the vicinity of a homogeneous oscillating instability. In the thermodynamic limit, the Hopf bifurcation is a dynamic critical point far from equilibrium described by a statistical field theory. We perform a perturbative renormalization group study, and show that at the critical point a generic relation between correlation and response functions appears. At the same time the fluctuation-dissipation relation is strongly violated.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur