Gerald Tripard

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Gerald E. Tripard, a Canadian born physicist and former director at Nuclear Radiation Center, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington. In 1967/68, as postdoc at ETH Zurich, along with Gerhard Rudolf and Werner Joho, Gerald Tripard is co-author of the chess program Charly ("Chess heuristics and algorithms for relaxing lazy yodelers") for a CDC 1604. The computer was basically used for calculations to design magnets for a cyclotron they were building and they used some extra weekend computer time for their work on chess. In 1968, they asked Richard Greenblatt for a match versus Mac Hack VI. Three games were played in October and November 1968 via ham radio, all won by Mac Hack VI.

=Horizon Effect= Gerald Tripard in a 2010 letter on his time at ETH Zurich, his chess program Charly, and the match versus Mac Hack VI in 1968, and the Horizon Effect : One of the more interesting problems of artificial intelligence that I learned about in working on the chess program was called, "The Horizon Effect". If a problem could be pushed "beyond the preprogrammed" tree search limit, the program would make the "bad" choice of sacrificing material to avoid losing, say, a queen "within" the horizon in the situation where the queen was going to be lost eventually anyway. I see this as not just a problem of "artificial" intelligence but human thinking in general, especially of politicians. You can find wonderful examples of this in today's headlines. For example politicians "buy" the favor of a certain class of workers by offering them fabulous retirement benefits. That effectively pushes an "accounting negative balance" beyond the horizon of the politician's career. The politician gets the immediate benefit of support from the affected workers but society will eventually have to pay the bill after the politician is gone.

=Nuclear Energy= Gerald Tripard in an article on the 50 year anniversary of the Washington State University Reactor, published March 9, 2011 in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News :

Gerald Tripard, a former director of the center, told the group it will take a lot of effort to make people recognize that nuclear energy is the energy of the future, not something to be afraid of.

"The generation that was brainwashed against nuclear power has to die off," he said. "You're not going to change their minds."

Tripard said there are about two generations of people who are "zealots" and aren't teachable, even if provided with facts and logic. People wonder what will be done with nuclear waste, he said, and don't realize the planet is one big nuclear waste dump from a supernova in the past.

=External Links=
 * Gerald Tripard | LinkedIn
 * July 1, 2010 letter from Dr. Gerald Tripard, hosted by Lawrence J. Krakauer

=References= Up one level