I had no idea that there was once a real-life incident reminiscent of the film War Games! [Solving chess] took Schaeffer harnessing computers all over the worl

I had no idea that there was once a real-life incident reminiscent of the film War Games! [Solving chess] took Schaeffer harnessing computers all over the world, drawing on and expanding his expertise in parallel computing. He conscripted machines everywhere from Switzerland to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a major Department of Energy facility that often deals with nuclear weapons. “There was somebody else there [running a program] called BOMB and I was running checkers programs,” Schaeffer told me. “It was a very strange situation. Security should have been concerned.” And they were. They paid him a visit after discovering gigabytes of data flowing out of a national lab to Edmonton, Alberta. (edit: add the remainder of the second paragraph.)