I'm a student at Canrgie Mellon and we currently have a competition for the best Chess playing bot-- one of the most critical optimizations is to perform game tree searches as deeply and quickly as possible-- your moves are timed, so the faster you can perform them the deeper depths that you can search. I was thinking about this assignment today, and realized I could push my depth search from depth 4 to probably 6-8 if I take my program to the apple store and let it run on an 8 core mac pro. Then I was thinking, why not use xgrid on all of those computers as well...
maybe I'm getting carried away with xgrid, but if anyone has any suggestions to do anything like this (as basic as parallel alpha-beta-tree searches all the way up to utilizing xgrid with Java) please speak up. Even links are appreciated.
thanks