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.

Özen

Özen is a Turkish name, it may refer to:

See also

Zen (2007 film)

Zen is a 2007 drama-horror film written and directed by Gary Davis. Filmed in Florida, it was released and screened at a Boynton Beach, Florida cinema on April 12, 2007. The DVD was released in North America on April 13, 2007.

Plot

Set in 17th-Century Japan, "Zen" is the chronicle of a young samurai, Master Mitzu Zen, who learns the secret way of killing vampires while learning about women and life in general. Master Zen (Kit DeZolt), a naive master who doesn't know anything about women and love, goes on a quest to find out the truth about his parents' sacred sword. While meeting people along the way, he ends up running into more than he bargained for when he starts encountering vampires.

Cast

Count Osaka

Davis' 2009 film Count Osaka is a sequel to Zen, with DeZolt reprising his role as the original movie's title character. It premiered December 2, 2009. It aired as part of the first Royal Palm Independent Film Festival in early 2010.

Zen (TV series)

Zen is a British television series produced by Left Bank Pictures for the BBC, co-produced with WGBH Boston for its Masterpiece anthology series, Mediaset and ZDF. It stars Rufus Sewell and Caterina Murino and is based on the Aurelio Zen detective novels by Michael Dibdin. The series was filmed on location in Italy, but the dialogue is in English. The series, which comprises three 90-minute films, was broadcast in the United Kingdom on Sunday evenings from 2 January 2011 on BBC One. The three films were based on the books Vendetta, Cabal and Ratking. The series was cancelled by BBC One in February 2011; BBC One controller Danny Cohen later said there were already enough male crime-fighters on TV. Left Bank, the show's producer, tried to find other broadcasters to fund another series but were unsuccessful.

Cast

Episodes

Series 1 (2011)

Series 1 was first shown in the USA on the PBS network: Vendetta, Cabal, and Ratking on 17, 24 and 31 July 2011, respectively.

References