Although I regularly compete with professional players, I’m not a chess professional myself. Instead, I followed a more traditional career path: after high school, I went to study engineering physics at Ghent University.
After graduating summa cum laude, I started a PhD. My research was about electromagnetics and how to perform large scale simulations using a supercomputer. The key is to make the parallel algorithm scalable as the size of the simulation and the number of processors grow. If you’re interested to know more, my PhD thesis is available at the online Ghent University Library.
After obtaining the doctoral degree, I went to industry, to work at ArcelorMittal Belgium as a model specialist.
From my interest in algorithms and programming, I don’t shy away from doing a “little project” once in a while. Let me introduce them to you!
Chess Novelties
As a competitive chess player, it is important to keep track of the latest theoretical developments and to find new ideas in the opening phase. This is often a time-consuming part of the chess training of the ambitious tournament player, in which Chess Novelties aims to assist.
Every week, TWIC publishes the latest games of the most recent chess competitions and tournaments. From these games, the most interesting and promising “novelties” are selected, depending on their computer evaluation, the popularity of the position, etc… The selection is performed in a fully automated way, without human review or intervention.
Visit chessnovelties.com to discover the Novelty of the Week!
Ionity Guide
If you are going on a long trip using an electric car, it is important to plan where to charge. Ionity Guide is an electric vehicle route planner for Ionity, one of the leading networks of fast chargers, with stations across Europe. If the distance from point A to point B is too long for the range of the electric car, the optimization model gives the shortest route from A to B, including the Ionity stations to charge the car.
Plan your trip and find the optimal route on ionityguide.eu!
BattR
A dynamic electricity pricing system, where the price of electricity varies from hour to hour, is the future. However, no one wants to spend time and effort planning to use electricity when the prices are low and to avoid consumption when the prices are high.
Using BattR, you can optimize your electricity bill in a fully automated way. The optimization program decides when to charge your home battery or electric car, taking into account the hourly electricity prices, current battery and car energy levels, expected energy consumption, solar energy forecast, etc…
Register on battr.be!
Round Robin
Scheduling the team competition, in which various teams and clubs compete against each other, is an annually recurring, time-consuming and difficult task. On the one hand, you want to keep the travel distances for the teams as low as possible, on the other hand, you have to take into account the availability of the playing halls. This makes the schedule an almost impossible puzzle, which Round Robin is happy to solve for you!
For more information, visit roundrobinsolutions.eu.
Magnus Number
Have you ever beaten a chess player who defeated Magnus Carlsen? Or a player who defeated another player who, in his turn, defeated the world chess champion? The number of victory steps from a player to Magnus Carlsen, that’s exactly what the so-called Magnus Number is!
You can discover your Magnus Number, your detailed victory path to Carlsen and much more on magnusnumber.com!