Fair enough. I wish I could say that what we're trying to do with ChessBrain II is easy. Because the effort is completely devoid of monetary compensation our full time jobs often interfere with our ability to devote the time required to make rapid progress.That said we remain committed to the project despite all obstacles.
Currently we're preparing for a presentation at the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games.
Our feeling is that ChessBrain II will be worth the wait, otherwise we wouldn't even bother working on it. Personally I think it will become the most exciting DC project ever to be offered to the DC community. The reason for this is because it will enable DC groups to administer their own virtual supercomputers.
Still your point is well taken... this is all talk until something tangible surfaces... I think we often forget that the excitement we have in what we're doing isn't visible to others and that the view from the outside is quite different from the view we have while continuing to work on the project.
All that said... our new target has become to launch before end of year (because that's when we need to gather real data for the presentation at IEEE CIG 2006) and to be fully operational by March 2006 (because our demo at IEEE GIG 2006 is in May). This will put us in line for a 2008 World Record attempt in January 2007 in Copenhagen.
I'd say we're not without vision... it's just that our vision is years in the making. Deep Blue was a 15 year project - we're in this for the long haul.
Feel free to share (or not!) what I've written in this email with others, personally and/or online via message boards.
Lastly, thanks for the nudge, we get emails like yours from time to time, and it's reassuring that others care enough to drop a note and express interest in the project. In part, it's what keeps us going!
- CJ