Helmut Horacek

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Helmut Horacek, an Austrian computer scientist, mathematician and AI-researcher with focus on natural language processing affiliated with the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken, and Saarland University. During the early 80, along with Hermann Kaindl, Marcus Wagner and Roland Schreier, Helmut Horacek 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. He is further author of the Pawn Endgame program PawnKing, which was also subject of his Ph.D. thesis, co-supervised by Wilhelm Barth from Vienna University of Technology and Curt Christian from University of Vienna. As elaborated in his 1983 paper, PawnKing relies on pawn- and king-pattern with bitboards as well as path algorithms to guide the search in his knowledge-based move selection and evaluation approach.

=Photos= Advances in Computer Chess 5 Smalltalk: Hans Berliner, Hermann Kaindl, Helmut Horacek, Adriaan de Groot and Reiner Seidel

=See also=
 * Merlin
 * PawnKing
 * Vienna University of Technology

=Selected Publications=

1980 ...

 * Helmut Horacek, Marcus Wagner (1981). Das Schachprogramm Merlin, Verbesserung von Laufzeit-Effizient, Eröffnungsbibliothek und Bewertungsfunktion. 4. Tagung "Berichte aus Informatik-Instituten" (German)
 * Helmut Horacek, Marcus Wagner (1982). Das Programm Merlin - Unterschiede zu konventionellen Schachprogrammen. OeGAI Journal, 1982 (German)
 * Helmut Horacek (1982). Ein Modell für Schachbauernendspiele mit menschlichen Problemlösungstechniken. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Vienna, supervisors Curt Christian (University of Vienna) and Wilhelm Barth (Vienna University of Technology).
 * Helmut Horacek (1982). Construction of Planned Move Trees for Chess Pawn Endings. Sigart Newsletter 80, pp. 163-168.
 * Helmut Horacek (1983). Knowledge-Based Move Selection and Evaluation to Guide the Search in Chess Pawn Endings. ICCA Journal, Vol. 6, No. 3
 * Helmut Horacek (1984). Some Conceptual Defects of Evaluation Functions. ECAI-84, Pisa, Elsevier
 * Helmut Horacek (1986). The Fifth World Computer Chess Championship. ICCA Journal, Vol. 9, No. 2
 * Helmut Horacek (1986, 1989). The Fifth World Computer Chess Championship Cologne, 1986. Research Unit for Information Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Hamburg from Kings Move - Welcome to the 1989 AGT World Computer Chess Championship. pg 21, pdf from The Computer History Museum (Abridged from ICGA Journal, Vol. 9, No. 2)
 * Hermann Kaindl, Helmut Horacek, Marcus Wagner (1986). Selective Search versus Brute Force. ICCA Journal, Vol. 9, No. 3
 * 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
 * Helmut Horacek (1989). Reasoning with Uncertainty in Computer Chess. Advances in Computer Chess 5

1990 ...

 * Russel Block, Helmut Horacek (1990). Generating Referring Expressions using Multiple Knowledge Sources. COLING-90 (ed. H. Karlgen), Vol. 2, pp. 24-29, Helsinki.
 * Hermann Kaindl, Reza Shams, Helmut Horacek (1991). Minimax Search Algorithms with and without Aspiration Windows. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 13, No. 12
 * Reza Shams, Hermann Kaindl, Helmut Horacek (1991). Using Aspiration Windows for Minimax Algorithms. IJCAI 1991, pdf
 * Helmut Horacek (1993). Computer Chess, its Impact on Artificial Intelligence. ICCA Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 » WCCC 1992 - Workshop

2000 ...

 * Helmut Horacek (2000). Towards Understanding Conceptual Differences Between Minimaxing and Product-Propagation. ECAI 2000,
 * Helmut Horacek (2003). A Best-First Search Algorithm for Generating Referring Expressions. EACL 2003
 * Helmut Horacek (2008). Towards Designing Operationalizable Models of Man-Machine Interaction Based on Concepts from Human Dialog Systems. NLDB 2008
 * Helmut Horacek (2008). A High-Level Categorization of Explanation A Case Study with a Tutoring System. ExaCt 2008

2010 ...

 * Florin Haque, Helmut Horacek (2015). Generating Referential Descriptions Involving Relations by a Best-First Searching Procedure – A System Demo. ENLG 2015, pdf
 * Hermann Kaindl, Helmut Horacek, Anton Scheucher (2017). Product Propagation: A Back-up Rule Better than Minimaxing? IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, Vol. 9, No. 2, pdf

=External Links=
 * Bloomsbury - Helmut Horacek
 * Helmut Horacek's ICGA Tournaments

=References= Up one level