Monty Newborn

Last updated

Monroe "Monty" Newborn (born May 21, 1938), former chairman of the Computer Chess Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, [1] is a professor emeritus of computer science at McGill University in Montreal [2] (formerly professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University). [3] He briefly served as president of the International Computer Chess Association and co-wrote a computer chess program named Ostrich In the 1970's. [4]

Contents

Biography

Monty Newborn received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from The Ohio State University in 1967. He was an assistant professor and associate professor at Columbia University in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 1967 to 1975. In 1975, he joined the School of Computer Science at McGill University and has been with the School since then, serving as its director from 1976 to 1983. [5] He was the chairman of the ACM Computer Chess Committee since the early 1980s. His chess program, Ostrich, competed in five world championships dating back to 1974. He served as president of the International Computer Chess Association from 1983 to 1986. [6] He retired from the faculty of McGill University in 2008.

A notable quote by Newborn on the science of chess AI programming occurred in 2006: “I don’t know what one could get out of it at this point. The science is done,” Monty Newborn, Dec. 2006 in reference to world champion Vladimir Kramnik’s loss to Deep Fritz, 4-2, and the prospect of further human-computer matches. Newborn was belatedly correct; as of 2021, that was the last serious attempt by a world class player to defeat a top chess machine/program.

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deep Blue (chess computer)</span> Chess-playing computer made by IBM

Deep Blue was a chess-playing expert system run on a unique purpose-built IBM supercomputer. It was the first computer to win a game, and the first to win a match, against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. Development began in 1985 at Carnegie Mellon University under the name ChipTest. It then moved to IBM, where it was first renamed Deep Thought, then again in 1989 to Deep Blue. It first played world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in 1996, where it lost four games to two. It was upgraded in 1997 and in a six-game re-match, it defeated Kasparov by winning two games and drawing three. Deep Blue's victory is considered a milestone in the history of artificial intelligence and has been the subject of several books and films.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer chess</span> Computer hardware and software capable of playing chess

Computer chess includes both hardware and software capable of playing chess. Computer chess provides opportunities for players to practice even in the absence of human opponents, and also provides opportunities for analysis, entertainment and training. Computer chess applications that play at the level of a chess grandmaster or higher are available on hardware from supercomputers to smart phones. Standalone chess-playing machines are also available. Stockfish, Leela Chess Zero, GNU Chess, Fruit, and other free open source applications are available for various platforms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Levy (chess player)</span> English chess player, writer, and entrepreneur

David Neil Laurence Levy is an International Master of chess who plays for Scotland, and a businessman. He is noted for his involvement with computer chess and artificial intelligence, and as the founder of the Computer Olympiads and the Mind Sports Olympiads. He has written more than 40 books on chess and computers.

Deep Thought was a computer designed to play chess. Deep Thought was initially developed at Carnegie Mellon University and later at IBM. It was second in the line of chess computers developed by Feng-hsiung Hsu, starting with ChipTest and culminating in Deep Blue. In addition to Hsu, the Deep Thought team included Thomas Anantharaman, Mike Browne, Murray Campbell and Andreas Nowatzyk. Deep Thought became the first computer to beat a grandmaster in a regular tournament game when it beat Bent Larsen in 1988, but was easily defeated in both games of a two-game match with Garry Kasparov in 1989 as well as in a correspondence match with Michael Valvo.

Robert Morgan Hyatt is an American computer scientist and programmer. He co-authored the computer chess programs Crafty and Cray Blitz which won two World Computer Chess Championships in the 1980s. Hyatt was a computer science professor at the University of Southern Mississippi (1970–1985) and University of Alabama at Birmingham (1988–2016).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Belle (chess machine)</span>

Belle was a chess computer developed by Joe Condon (hardware) and Ken Thompson (software) at Bell Labs. In 1983, it was the first machine to achieve master-level play, with a USCF rating of 2250. It won the ACM North American Computer Chess Championship five times and the 1980 World Computer Chess Championship. It was the first system to win using specialized chess hardware.

Mac Hack is a computer chess program written by Richard D. Greenblatt. Also known as Mac Hac and The Greenblatt Chess Program, it was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mac Hack VI was the first chess program to play in human tournament conditions, the first to be granted a chess rating, and the first to win against a person in tournament play. A pseudocode for the program is given in Figure 11.16 of.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">McGill University Faculty of Engineering</span>

The Faculty of Engineering is one of the constituent faculties of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in bio-engineering, bioresource, chemical, civil, computer, electrical, mechanical, materials, mining, and software engineering. The faculty also comprises the School of Architecture and the School of Urban Planning, and teaches courses in bio-resource engineering and biomedical engineering at the master's level.

Chess was a pioneering chess program from the 1970s, written by Larry Atkin, David Slate and Keith Gorlen at Northwestern University. Chess ran on Control Data Corporation's line of supercomputers. Work on the program began in 1968 while the authors were graduate students at the university. The first competitive version was Chess 2.0 which gradually evolved to Chess 3.6 and was rewritten as the 4.x series. It dominated the first computer chess tournaments, such as the World Computer Chess Championship and ACM's North American Computer Chess Championship. NWU Chess adopted several innovative or neglected techniques including bitboard data structures, iterative deepening, transposition tables, and an early form of forward pruning later called futility pruning. The 4.x versions were the first programs to abandon selective search in favor of full-width fixed-depth searching.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">McGill University School of Computer Science</span>

The School of Computer Science is an academic department in the Faculty of Science at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The School is the second most funded computer science department in Canada. As of 2024, it has 43 faculty members, 60 Ph.D. students and 100 Master's students.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">North American Computer Chess Championship</span> Computer chess championship held from 1970 to 1994

The North American Computer Chess Championship was a computer chess championship held from 1970 to 1994. It was organised by the Association for Computing Machinery and by Monty Newborn, Professor of Computer Science at McGill University. It was one of the first computer chess tournaments. The 14th NACCC was also the World Computer Chess Championship. The event was canceled in 1995 as Deep Blue was preparing for the first match against world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and never resumed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kotok-McCarthy</span> Early computer chess program

Kotok-McCarthy also known as A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090 Computer was the first computer program to play chess convincingly. It is also remembered because it played in and lost the first chess match between two computer programs. A pseudocode of the program is in Figure 11.15 of.

Murray Campbell is a Canadian computer scientist known for being part of the team that created Deep Blue; the first computer to defeat a world chess champion.

This article documents the progress of significant human–computer chess matches.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shankar Sastry</span> American academic

S. Shankar Sastry is the Founding Chancellor of the Plaksha University, Mohali and a former Dean of Engineering at University of California, Berkeley.

In turn-based games, permanent brain is the act of thinking during the opponent's turn. Chess engines that continue calculating even when it is not their turn to play end up choosing moves that are stronger than if they are barred from calculating on their opponent's turn.

Alan Theodore Sherman is a full professor of computer science at UMBC, director of the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance (CISA), and director of the UMBC Chess Program. Sherman is an editor for Cryptologia, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi.

Raj Mittra is an Indian-born electrical engineer and academician. He is currently a professor of electrical engineering at University of Central Florida. Previously, he was a faculty member at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Pennsylvania State University, where he was the director of the Electromagnetic Communication Laboratory of the Electrical Engineering department. His specialities include computational electromagnetics and communication antenna design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prakash Panangaden</span> American/Canadian computer scientist

Prakash Panangaden is an American/Canadian computer scientist noted for his research in programming language theory, concurrency theory, Markov processes and duality theory. Earlier he worked on quantum field theory in curved space-time and radiation from black holes. He is the founding Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Logic and Computation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tal Arbel</span> Professor of Electrical Engineering

Tal Arbel is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at McGill University who specialises in computer vision. She is interested in the application of artificial intelligence in healthcare.

References

  1. The New York Times
  2. Once Again, Machine Beats Human Champion at Chess
  3. Habitats tomorrow: homes and communities in an exciting new era : selections from The futurist, Edward Cornish, World Future Society
  4. Habitats tomorrow: homes and communities in an exciting new era : selections from The futurist, Edward Cornish, World Future Society
  5. "Monty Newborn".
  6. "IBM100 - Deep Blue". 7 March 2012.
  7. McGill Newborn