The History of Computer Chess: An AI Perspective (video lecture)

Playing chess by computer began in the early 1950s, nearly as soon as computers became available. As a human activity, chess is believed to require 'thinking,' yet in 1997 a massively-parallel supercomputer, drawing on over four decades of continual advances in both hardware and software, defeated the best human player in the world.

Does playing chess require thinking? Or is human thinking perhaps a form of calculation, parts of which a computer can mimic? What is the tradeoff between 'knowledge' and 'search?' Was Claude Shannon's 1950 prediction that studying computer chess might lead to applications in other areas fulfilled?

This panel, comprising seminal contributors to the solution of this challenge including two of AI's leading pioneersùwill discuss these and other questions as well as the origin and development of computer chess and what it tells us about ourselves and the machines we build.
The panel consist of such great and prestigious members as:

Campbell, Murray (the member of the team "IBM Deep Blue") a Canadian computer scientist and chess player, most famous for being member of the Deep Blue team and beating Gary Kasparov in 1997. Campbell is actually a research scientist at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Murray Campbell got hooked in computer chess at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, where he worked with Tony Marsland on parallel search and Principal variation search. He left Canada to enroll at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a doctoral candidate in Computer Science. Supported by his advisor Hans Berliner, he developed the chunking pawn endgame program Chunker, and received his Ph.D. in 1987 for his work on chunking as an abstraction mechanism in solving complex problems. Along with Gordon Goetsch, he researched on the Null move heuristic - none recursively with a modest Depth Reduction R Campbell was member of the HiTech team around Berliner, while Feng-hsiung Hsu and Thomas Anantharaman were already developing ChipTest, the predecessor of Deep Thought. In 1986, Murray Campbell left the HiTech team for ChipTest and Deep Thought, and in 1989, Campbell and Hsu joined IBM to develop Deep Blue. Murray Campbell's main function in the Deep Blue team was the development of the evaluation function. He worked closely with the team's chess consultant, Joel Benjamin, in preparing the opening book. Feigenbaum, Edward (a father of Expert Systems); an American electrical engineer, computer scientist, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University, and pioneer in developing expert systems in artificial intelligence, notably the Dendral project [1]. He received his Ph.D., 1959, in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University under supervision of Herbert Simon, describing an Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer, dubbed EPAM, one of the first computer models on how to learn [2], influential in formalizing the concept of a chunk, as for instance in Fernand Gobet's CHREST (Chunk Hierarchy and REtrieval STructures) architecture. In 1960 Feigenbaum went to the University of California, Berkeley, to teach in the School of Business Administration. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1965 where he was chairman of the CS Department from 1976 to 1981. As professor emeritus at Stanford, Feigenbaum has focused interest, as a Board of Trustees member of The Computer History Museum, on preserving the history of computer science, and with the Stanford Libraries on software for building and using digital archives [3]. In September 2005, along with Monty Newborn, Murray Campbell, David Levy and John McCarthy, he participated on the panel discussion The History of Computer Chess: An AI Perspective at The Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. Levy, David N. L.; a Scottish International Master chess player (IM Title 1969), Bachelor of Science in Pure Maths, Physics and Statistics, renowned computer chess expert and promoter, tournament organizer, businessman, and president of the ICGA, the International Computer Games Association. David Levy authored and co-authored an enormous number of articles and books on Chess, Computer Chess and AI-Topics. Noteworthy is the commercial edition of his Ph.D. thesis Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, which he defended successfully on October 11, 2007, at Maastricht University, The Netherlands David is an international chess master and organizer of many chess computers events - many of them together with Monroe Newborn; the president of ICGA - International Computer Games Association; the most know from the "chess bet" - in 1967 he said no computer would be able to beat him in a match and he won the bet. McCarthy, John; (a father of Expert Systems Artificial Inteligence); was an American researcher in computer science and pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. After short-term appointments at Princeton, Stanford, Dartmouth, and MIT, John McCarthy became a full professor at Stanford in 1962, where he remained until his retirement at the end of 2000. In 1971 John McCarthy received the Turing Award for his major AI contributions. Newborn, Monroe (the moderator) at the panel. a Canadian computer scientist, and emeritus professor at McGill University [1] in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Monty was early computer chess programmer and primary author of the chess program Ostrich, and the pawn endgame program Peasant [2]. In 1970 Monty Newborn and Ben Mittman initiated, constituted and organized the ACM North American Computer Chess Championship, and together with Ben Mittman and David Levy the World Computer Chess Championship in 1974. Newborn was co-founder of the ICCA in 1977, and served as its president from 1983 until 1986. He has written extensively on computer chess.

Date: 2005-09-08; Extent (length of this video) 02:05:57 (2 hours and 57 seconds of real watching); Place of Publication: Mountain View, California, USA