L. Stephen Coles

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L. Stephen Coles, (January 19, 1941 – December 3, 2014) was an American electrical engineer, mathematician, AI-researcher, doctor of medicine, gerontologist, biomedical scientist, co-founder and director of the Gerontology Research Group, lecturer with the University of California, Los Angeles Molecular Biology Institute and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and a research collaborator in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He was researcher on supercentenarians and aging, and creator of The Bridge Plan, containing nutrition and lifestyle recommendations that are believed to help maximize life expectancy, to possibly bridge the gap until a hoped-for biomedical singularity event. L. Stephen Coles died on December 3, 2014 of pancreatic cancer. His brain was cryonically preserved by Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

=Biography= L. Stephen Coles received a B.Sc. in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, a M.Sc. in mathematics from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in systems science and communication sciences from Carnegie Mellon University in 1969 on Natural language processing. He researched on artificial intelligence, robots and biorobotics at Stanford Research Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, focused on medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and completed his medical intern in obstetrics and gynaecology at the Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine at University of Miami, and served as lecturer and visiting scholar and researcher at University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Harvard University and UCLA.

=Computer Chess= While affiliated with Carnegie Tech, researching on AI, Steve Coles became interested in computer chess. He shared his sobering experience to lose a game of chess from Mac Hack VI in April 1967 with Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, expressing his concerns on the development of computer chess at Carnegie Tech with their time-sharing system of the dual processor CDC G-21, and mentioning programmers George Baylor and Joseph S. Rubenfeld and others working on chess programs. During the early 70s, Steve Coles published several articles, reports and notes on computer chess in ACM SIGART Bulletin.

=The Drosophila of AI= In his 1994 article Computer Chess: The Drosophila of AI, posted 2002 in Dr. Dobbs , he produced a figure and calculated a roughly forty-point per year growth rate in best computer Elo ratings since 1960. Mentioned chess programs of the computer chart are NSS, MacHack, Chess 4.x, Belle, HiTech, Deep Thought and Deep Blue, the intersection point with the human chart estimated in about 1997. Fifty years of human and computer chess

=Selected Publications=

1967 ...

 * Steve Coles (1967). Memorandum - Chess at Carnegie Tech. pdf
 * L. Stephen Coles (1967). Syntax Directed Interpretation of Natural Language. Ph.D. thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, also in Herbert Simon, Laurent Siklóssy (eds.) (1972). Representation and Meaning: Experiments with Information Processing Systems. Prentice-Hall
 * L. Stephen Coles (1969). Talking with a Robot in English. 1. IJCAI 1969, pdf
 * Alan H. Bond, Jerry Rightnour, L. Steven Coles (1969). An Interactive Graphical Display Monitor in a Batch-processing Environment with Remote Entry. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 12, No. 11

1970 ...

 * Steve Coles (1973). Computer to Model Nervous System of Lobster at Carnegie-Mellon. ACM SIGART Bulletin, No. 38
 * Steve Coles (1973). Fourth United States computer chess championship from ACM73 news release. ACM SIGART Bulletin, No. 41
 * Oscar Firschein, Martin A. Fischler, L. Stephen Coles, Jay M. Tenenbaum (1973). Forecasting and Assessing the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Society. 3. IJCAI, pdf
 * Michael H. Smith, L. Stephen Coles (1973). Design of a Low Cost, General Purpose Robot. 3. IJCAI. pdf

1990 ...

 * L. Stephen Coles (1994). Computer Chess: The Drosophila of AI. AI Expert, Vol. 9, No. 4, Miller Freeman, Inc., posted October 30, 2002 in Dr. Dobbs

2000 ...

 * Pamela McCorduck (2004). Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. A. K. Peters (25th anniversary edition)

=External Links=
 * L. Stephen Coles from Wikipedia
 * Computer Chess: The Drosophila of AI by L. Stephen Coles, Dr. Dobbs, October 30, 2002 (republished 1994 article)
 * L. Stephen Coles | LinkedIn
 * Gerontology Research Group Index Page
 * Interview with L. Stephen Coles, MD, PhD by Vicki Glaser, Rejuvenation Research, June 2013, Vol. 16, No. 3
 * L. Stephen Coles dies at 73; studied extreme aging in humans by Steve Chawkins, Los Angeles Times, December 04, 2014

=References= Up one level