BERLIN -- If the first two days of the Chaos Communication Congress were overshadowed by two of the darkest episodes in the history of the Chaos Computer Club, Tuesday was all about looking ahead to the future.
"I'd like to propose that next year, we either extend the Congress for a few days or meet a few days later than usual," announced a member of the German Lockpicking Union at the final meeting. The congress is usually held between Christmas and New Year's Day.
"That way, we can make an assessment of what really happens after January 1, 2000."
After the roar of laughter and applause, the heads of the congress said they'd consider the idea. "I just don't want anyone to get the idea that the [Chaos Computer Club] has anything to with what happens," said club spokesman Andy Mueller-Maguhn.
"Y2K is not our chaos."
Only a single lecture was scheduled for the Y2K problem, but the topic wouldn't stop popping up. Speaking on "The Computer and the Myth of Complete Control," Joseph Weizenbaum, the former MIT professor who wrote the ELIZA psychotherapy bot, said he looked forward to the Y2K mess.
"It presents an opportunity to instruct the general public as to just what computers are and what they aren't, what they can do and what they can't."
As for hackers, "I don't want to flatter you," he said, "but you are a source of creativity, like poets or composers."
The open-source movement fueled a good deal of buzz at this year's event, including an all-day Linux installation party. Volker Grassmuck, a computer scientist at Humboldt University, presented something of an open-source extravanganza.
With Wizards of OS, scheduled for next July in Berlin, Grassmuck plans to devote three days to exploring the parallels between operating systems and social systems.
"This could be the most important event in years," said Chaos Computer Club co-founder Wau Holland. The last day of the congress was poised to end on a somber note, with discussions of the death this fall of club member Tron, a screening of the hacking thriller film 23, and a reassessment of hacker Karl Koch's death 10 years before.
Meanwhile, three teams quietly competed in a robot-building contest in the basement. Given a few Lego kits, the teams constructed a few rolling, navigating, and wandering machines.
Then Frank Wilde stepped forward with a Turing machine he cobbled together with his team's leftover pieces. Wilde held up a strip of Lego blocks with tiny black knobs sticking through a series of holes.
"This is the data band," he explained, "and I can program the machine to add, say, two and three."
Once he fed the band into his tiny mound of Lego blocks, enthusiastic club members rushed to the stage to watch the machine meticulously figure out that two and three are indeed five.
Wilde was awarded the first prize by an overwhelming majority. His Lego Turing machine is precisely the sort of spontaneous elegant hack that the congress was called to celebrate in the first place.
