Marcus Wagner

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Marcus Wagner, an Austrian computer scientist, in the late 70s and 80s affiliated with the Vienna University of Technology. Along with Hermann Kaindl, Helmut Horacek and Roland Schreier, Marcus Wagner was co-author of the chess program Merlin, competing at various ACM North American Computer Chess Championships and two World Computer Chess Championships in the 80s.

=CDC Assembly= As mentioned in Werner DePauli-Schimanovich's 2006 book Europolis 6 and the reprinted paper Das Schachprogramm Merlin ... by Helmut Horacek and Marcus Wagner, Merlin was initially based on the didactic program Chess 0.5 by Larry Atkin and Peter W. Frey, as published 1978 in Byte Magazine, also written in Pascal except some time critical, often called routines, which were re-written in CDC assembly by Wagner.

=Problems= DePauli-Schimanovich further mentions the problems Wagner had in maintaining and testing Merlin at the university data center. Merlin often crashed the standard editor and operating system of the CDC Cyber 73, and Wagner got the hell from the head of interdisciplinary practical, Günther Vinek, who obviously was not a computer chess supporter ... "Zu was brauchen wir die Spielereien mit dem Schach? Ihr sollt was Vernünftiges programmieren und nicht die Ressourcen des Rechenzentrums mit Schachspielen vergeuden!" ... opposed to Schimanovich, or Kaindl's advisor Wilhelm Barth, a computer chess programmer himself. According to DePauli-Schimanovich, Vinek's attitude was not conducive to Wagner's further studying at the TU.

=See also=
 * Merlin
 * Vienna University of Technology

=Selected Publications=
 * Helmut Horacek, Marcus Wagner (1981). Das Schachprogramm Merlin, Verbesserung von Laufzeit-Effizient, Eröffnungsbibliothek und Bewertungsfunktion. 4. Tagung "Berichte aus Informatik-Instituten" (German)
 * Hermann Kaindl, Helmut Horacek, Marcus Wagner (1986). Selective Search versus Brute Force. ICCA Journal, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 140-145.
 * Hermann Kaindl, Marcus Wagner, Helmut Horacek (1988). Comparing Various Pruning Algorithms on Very Strongly Ordered Game Trees: The Details. Tech. Report #50, Department of Statistics and Computer Science, Vienna University of Technology, Austria.
 * Hermann Kaindl, Marcus Wagner, Helmut Horacek (1989). Comparing Various Pruning Algorithms on Very Strongly Ordered Game Trees. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search

=External Links=
 * Marcus Wagner's ICGA Tournaments

=References=

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