Author: José Antônio Fabiano Mendes
Date: 08:43:22 03/29/00
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On March 28, 2000 at 14:12:38, Jari Huikari wrote: >On March 28, 2000 at 12:52:04, José Antônio Fabiano Mendes wrote: > >>http://www.chessvariants.com/small.dir/losalamos.html JAFM > >http://www.math.jyu.fi/~huikari/ALAMOS.ZIP :-) > > Jari Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam is best known for his pivotal role in developing the hydrogen bomb in the 1940s and 1950s,but that´s not what put him in the record books.The government laboratory in Los Alamos,New Mexico,got hold of one of the first computers,MANIAC I,so that Ulam and the other H-bomb researchers wouldn´t have to stay up nights solving their voluminous equations with pencil and paper.Ulam,who described himself modestly as a "fair" chess player,couldn´t resist putting the machine to work on a project of somewhat less import to cold-war strategy.Together with physicist Paul Stein,he wrote one of the first chess-playing programs. Ulam´s program was a mediocre player at best.Even though it considered a mere two moves in advance,it would still have required an hour of computation each turn had Ulam not also simplified the game by removing two bishops and two pawns from each side and reducing the size of the board from 64 squares to 36. With this help,in 1956 the program just managed to eke out a victory against one of Ulam´s colleagues,becoming,40 years ago,the first program to beat a human,albeit a rank beginner,at a stripped-down version of chess. Source:"Discover" magazine,June 1996,page 48,"Silicon Gambit" by Fred Guterl
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