Jack Good

Home * People * Jack Good



Irving John (Jack) Good, (December 9, 1916 - April 5, 2009) a British statistician and computer pioneer. During World War II, Good worked with Alan Turing and Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander at Bletchley Park, with Donald Michie and Shaun Wylie et al. in the section Newmanry headed by Max Newman, contributing to crack the German Lorenz cipher. After the war he worked at the University of Manchester and Atlas Computer Laboratory, and had a variety of defense, consulting and academic positions, until he came to the United States in 1967, becoming a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. In 1965 he originated the concept of an intelligence explosion, now known as technological singularity, which anticipates the eventual advent of superhuman intelligence. Jack Good died on April 5, 2009, aged 92.

=Photos= I. J. Good, nearest to camera - Cheltenham Chronicle. Final of the National Chess Club championship, a telephone match. August 20, 1955

=Five-Year Plan= Jack Good was a strong chess player, and he published several papers related to computer chess in Michie's Machine Intelligence series, most notably his Five-Year Plan for Automatic Chess in 1968 , excerpts reprinted in David Levy's Computer Chess Compendium, covering Material, Quiescence, Turbulence, and Agitation. =Theorem-Proving= Theorem-proving was mentioned in the Five-Year Plan for Automatic Chess : Theorem-proving resembles chess Playing in that we have an objective and an analysis tree, or graph, but differs in that a superficial expected pay-off replaces the iterated minimax. The minimax idea can come in if we are trying to prove a theorem and we imagine that we have an opponent who wishes to disprove it. The value of our game is 1 if the theorem is true and — 1 if it is false. In the proof trees described in the paper by Dr D. C. Cooper the 'and's correspond to moves of the opponent, since we must allow for both branches, whereas the `or's correspond to our own moves. The minimax (strictly maximin) value of the tree tells us whether the theorem is true, and, if we allow for superficial probabilities at the endpoints of the tree, the minimax value is the superficial probability of the theorem.

=Quotes=

Jack Good
by Jack Good, 1998 : In letters to Turing, on September 16 and October 3, 1948, I mentioned the idea of resonance circuits in the brain; especially as a method for noticing analogies... In the postscript I discussed chess-playing machines, which he and I had discussed in 1941, and gave a reasonable definition of a forced variation. I took for granted the need to distinguish between quiescent and non-quiescent positions. Shannon's paper on chess appeared in 1950.

In a letter to F C Williams in July 1951 I said "A facetious question is whether it is intended to display chess positions on the monitoring tubes". Of course today it is no longer at all facetious.

David Levy
David Levy in Computer Chess Compendium : Perhaps non-linear evaluation functions will become popular at some future date, in which case some of Good's ideas will come into their own.

The Times
Excerpt from the Obituary, The Times To statisticians, Good is one of the founding fathers of Bayesian statistics, an approach to the discipline based on work of Thomas Bayes in 1764. In it one forms a view of the phenomenon under study, quantifying one's uncertainty in terms of a probability distribution (the prior distribution). One then draws a sample, obtaining data, and uses the data and Bayes's theorem to update this prior uncertainty to give a new distribution, the posterior distribution. This approach - the Bayesian paradigm, as it is now called - was little used before Good's work but was given an important boost by his 1950 book and his extensive subsequent writings, and is firmly established today. Good's other interests included artificial intelligence - in particular, training computers to play chess and philosophy.

=From Russia with Love= In 1991, Jack Good analyzed the famous position shown in the film From Russia with Love, Kronsteen vs. MacAdams, with the motive of the position was taken from Spassky versus Bronstein 1960. The difference is that MacAdams had 22...Ne6.

[Event "URS-ch"] [Site "Leningrad"] [Date "1960.??.??"] [Round "?"] [White "Boris Spassky"] [Black "David Bronstein"] [Result "1-0"]

1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 3.Nf3 d5 4.exd5 Bd6 5.Nc3 Ne7 6.d4 0-0 7.Bd3 Nd7 8.0-0 h6 9.Ne4 Nxd5 10.c4 Ne3 11.Bxe3 fxe3 12.c5 Be7 13.Bc2 Re8 14.Qd3 e2 15.Nd6 Nf8 16.Nxf7 exf1Q+ 17.Rxf1 Bf5 18.Qxf5 Qd7 19.Qf4 Bf6 20.N3e5 Qe7 21.Bb3 Bxe5 22.Nxe5+ Kh7 23.Qe4+ 1-0
 * Desde Rusia con Amor, YouTube Video

=See also=
 * From Codebreaking to Computing - Video from The Computer History Museum
 * HAL 9000
 * Point Value - Theoretical Attempt
 * The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing - Video

=Selected Publications=

1939

 * Jack Good (1939). Mathematics and chess. Eureka I

1940 ...

 * Jack Good (1941) Fourier Analysis. Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, advisor Godfrey Harold Hardy
 * Jack Good, Donald Michie, Geoffrey Timms (1945). General Report on Tunny from The Turing Archive for the History of Computing
 * Jack Good (1946). Normal Recurring Decimals. Journal of the London Mathematical Society 1946
 * Jack Good (1949). The number of individuals in a casade process. Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Vol. 45

1950 ...

 * Jack Good (1950). Probability and the Weighing of Evidence. Griffin, London
 * Jack Good (1952/55). Notes on Randomised Chess. Chess
 * Jack Good (1953). The population frequencies of species and the estimation of population parameters. Biometrika, Vol. 40, Nos. 3-4
 * Jack Good (1959). Could a machine make probability judgments? Computers and Automation, Vol. 8

1960 ...

 * Jack Good (1962). Botryological speculations. in
 * Jack Good, A. J. Mayne, John Maynard Smith (eds.) (1962). The Scientist Speculates. Heinemann


 * Jack Good (1964). Measurement of decisions. in William W. Cooper, Harold J. Leavitt, Maynard W. Shelly (eds.) (1964). New Perspectives in Organisation Research. pp. 391-404. Wiley
 * Jack Good (1964). The Human Preserve. an Invited Contribution to a Symposium on Extraterrestrial Life held by the Institute of Biology and the British Interplanetary Society, May 1964, Records of Royal Naval Scientific Service
 * Jack Good (1965). Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine. Advances in Computers, Vol. 6, pdf, pdf
 * Jack Good (1965). The generalization of Lagrange's expansion and the enumeration of trees. Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Vol. 61, No. 2
 * Jack Good (1965). Logic of man and machine. IPC Magazines Limited
 * Jack Good (1965). The Mystery of Go. Literature: Reports hosted by Atlas Computer Laboratory
 * Jack Good (1966). The probability of war. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, Vol. 129
 * Jack Good (1967). Human and machine logic. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 18
 * Jack Good, R.F. Churchhouse (1968). A New Conjecture Related to the Riemann Hypothesis. in Some Research Applications of the Computer, Atlas Computer Laboratory
 * Jack Good (1968). A Five-Year Plan for Automatic Chess. Machine Intelligence Vol. 2, pdf
 * Jack Good (1969). Analysis of the machine chess game, J. Scott (White), ICL-1900 versus R.D. Greenblatt, PDP-10. Machine Intelligence Vol. 4 pp. 267-270 » John J. Scott, ICL 1900, Richard Greenblatt, PDP-10

1970 ...

 * Jack Good (1977). Dynamic Probability, Computer Chess, and the Measurement of Knowledge. Machine Intelligence Vol. 8 pp. 139-150
 * Jack Good (1978). Review of "Advances in Computer Chess, Volume 1. by M.R.B. Clarke"; University Press, 1977. ACM SIGART Bulletin, Issue 66 » Mike Clarke, Advances in Computer Chess 1
 * Jack Good (1978). Historical Notes. Personal Computing, Vol. 2, No. 10, pp. 80, October 1978, from  Jack Good (1968). A Five-Year Plan for Automatic Chess.
 * Jack Good (1978). Historical Notes. Personal Computing, Vol. 2, No. 11, pp. 27, November 1978, cont.
 * Jack Good (1979). On the Grading of Chess Players. Personal Computing, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 47
 * Jack Good (1979). Rules for computer chess tournaments: an open letter to the tournament rules and organization committee of the International Computer Chess Association. ICCA Newsletter, Vol. 2, No. 2
 * Jack Good (1979). Studies in the history of probability and statistics. XXXVII AM Turing’s statistical work in World War II. Biometrika, Vol. 66, No. 2

1980 ...

 * Jack Good (1982). When will the rules of chess be changed? British Chess Magazine 102, No. 7 (July 1982), 305-306.
 * Jack Good (1988). Some Comments Concerning an Article by De Groot. ICCA Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2/3
 * Jack Good (1988). The Interface Between Statistics and Philosophy of Science. Statistical Science, Vol. 3, No. 4

1990 ...

 * Jack Good (1991). Analysis of the chess position shown in the film From Russia with Love, Kronsteen vs. MacAdams. Chess Monthly, Vol. 56, No. 5
 * Jack Good (1998). The first game of randomized chess played in a regular chess match. Chess Monthly, Vol. 63, No. 5

2000 ...

 * Jack Good (2000). Turing’s anticipation of emprical Bayes in connection with the cryptanalysis of the naval enigma. Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, Vol. 66, No. 2

=External Links=
 * I.J. Good from Wikipedia
 * Good–Turing frequency estimation from Wikipedia
 * The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Irving Good
 * Ratio Club from Wikipedia
 * I.J. Good - University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, 1967-94 from Virginia Tech
 * Irving John (Jack) Good from PEOPLE and PIONEERS © J.A.N. Lee, 1998-2002.
 * Professor I J Good from Atlas Computer Laboratory, hosted by Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL)
 * Professor Jack Good, Telegraph, April 09, 2009
 * Spies and Spymasters > Second World War  > Jack Good from Spartacus Educational
 * Chess and the Code-Breakers by Edward Winter

=References=

Up one level