Alex Bernstein

Home * People * Alex Bernstein



Alex Bernstein, (December 14, 1930 - March 11, 1999 ) was an American mathematician, chess player, and computer chess pioneer. While affiliated with IBM in the 50s, along with his colleagues Michael de V. Roberts, Timothy Arbuckle and Martin Belsky, he was primary author of The Bernstein Chess Program for the IBM 704, which was the first complete chess program in history.

Alex Bernstein was born in Milan as son of Russian born, Italian mathematician Vladimir Bernstein (1900 - 1936) Quote from Laurent Mazliak, Thomas Perfettini (2019). ''[https://hal.sorbonne-universite.fr/hal-02280296v1 Under the protection of alien wings. Mathematicians in the Russian emigration in inter war France]''. hal-02280296v2: Finally, the trajectory of Vladimir Bernstein (1900 - 1936) constitutes another singular case, described in detail in Finzi (1936). Born in 1900 in Saint Petersburg, Bernstein entered the local university when he was 17 to specialize in mathematics and became close to Yakov Viktorovich Uspensky (1883 - 1947). Taking advantage of the proximity of the border, he decided to emigrate during the winter of 1919 by reaching Vyborg on the other side of the Gulf of Finland. Unfortunately, he was seriously wounded by bullet before arriving there, and he never fully recovered from this injury that led to his premature death in 1936. Arrived in France in the mid-1920s after a stay in London, he entered the Sorbonne and in 1930 defended a Ph.D. on the singularities of Dirichlet series, dedicated to ‘his master Paul Montel’. The lectures that Vladimir Bernstein presented at the Collège de France that same year on Dirichlet series were published in 1933 in the Borel series of monographs on the theory of functions as Bernstein (1933). The book was introduced by a very laudatory preface by Hadamard. It was in Italy, however, that Bernstein decided to settle down (he had already published several papers in Italian journals). He obtained Italian citizenship in 1931 and was responsible for teaching superior analysis in Milan and analytical geometry in Pavia. . In 1940, Vladimir’s mother Elizabeth and her second husband fled from Fascist Italy, bringing Alex and his sister to New York City. Alex Bernstein started playing chess seriously during his high school time at City College. After graduating from Columbia University, he served at the US army, where he became acquainted with computers. As full-time employee at IBM, he got interested in writing a chess program, and talked with Claude Shannon about his ideas. During the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, when he was invited to talk about his program already in development, a discussion with John McCarthy led to McCarthy's discovery of alpha-beta - according to McCarthy, Bernstein was not initially convinced about the idea. Pamela McCorduck, who was married to Joseph F. Traub gives details in her seminal book Machines Who Think , with some quotes below, including from an interview with Alex Bernstein.

=Quotes=

Machines Who Think
Alex Bernstein, pp. 180: I started playing chess seriously, I guess, when I was in high school. I played chess so much that it affected my grades in college. One year I played chess to the exclusion of everything else and woke up at the end of the term and discovered I had failed two courses. I was going to City College at the time. I failed a physics course and a math course — theory of functions of real variables. It was quite a shock and I gave up chess after that term. I suppose I continued reading about it, but I stopped playing chess. Then in graduate school, although I’d given up math for medieval literature and poetry, I worked as an assistant in the civil engineering department. After that I went into the army, and because of my work at Columbia and what I was doing in the army — working in a special research and development outfit of the Signal Corps, I became acquainted with computers and what they could do.

Pamela McCorduck, pp. 181: After Bernstein got out of the army he returned to Columbia, but the academic atmosphere got him down, and when the opportunity came to work full-time for IBM he took it. He had been working part time for them, and had become friendly with a young man named Hal Judd. Judd knew Bernstein had played serious chess, and one day suggested they try to produce a chess-playing program.

Alex Bernstein, pp. 181, 182: Nevertheless, the idea of a chess-playing program really intrigued me, so I decided to see if I could come up with a scheme for producing this program and forgetting some backing. It wasn’t impossible to work on this problem oneself, but one did need computer time and computer time is very expensive, although at the time there was a good deal of unused computer time during the third shift. Nevertheless, we had to have some permission at least to do it. So we went to Charlie DeCarlo, who was head of the so-called Applied Science Division at IBM. DeCarlo is a mathematician and came out of Carnegie, and he was very sympathetic to the idea, and said he’d support it on a limited basis. Thus I went to work full-time for IBM at what was then the Scientific Center, and later became part of the Service Bureau, in Manhattan. I was given other work to do, but essentially it was understood that half of my time I would be allowed to spend working on the chess program.

Pamela McCorduck, pp. 183: At this time, Bernstein was unaware of Shannon’s seminal papers, and did not know that chess had caught the interests of a group at Los Alamos, including J. Kister, P. Stein, S. Ulam, W. Walden, and M. Wells, who were working on a limited 6 x 6 board, rather than the regulation 8 x 8. Nor did he know that Allen Newell, J. C. Shaw, and Herbert Simon together, and John McCarthy independently, were also pondering chess-playing machines.

Pamela McCorduck, Alex Bernstein, pp. 183, 184: It was now that Bernstein became aware of Turing’s work and read at least one of Shannon’s papers. When he finally began to see how he might codify some of the principles he felt were essential, he telephoned Claude Shannon at MIT. “I went up to MIT and spent a day or two with him, telling him what I was planning to do, and he said he thought it was intelligent, and a good way of proceeding. Essentially I felt I’d received his blessings, which was pleasant.”

Pamela McCorduck, pp. 113: In addition, others came to Dartmouth for short visits to talk about related work, and among those visitors was Alex Bernstein, then a programmer for IBM in New York City, who was invited to talk about the chess-playing program he was working on. His work was known to Shannon, Rochester, and Arthur Samuel, who himself was working on what was to be one of the earliest and most successful of the game-playing programs with computers, one that played checkers.

Pamela McCorduck, pp. 116: Alex Bernstein, who had come up to Dartmouth from New York to talk about the chess-playing program he already had under way, remembers hearing McCarthy’s plans to begin on a chess-playing program, and listening with interest to his ideas. But when they came to play a game of chess with each other, the equivalent of mano a mano in the world of science, Bernstein won, despite the fact that he’d accepted the handicap of playing blindfold.

John McCarthy
John McCarthy in The Dartmouth Workshop--as planned and as it happened Alex Bernstein of IBM presented his chess program under construction. My reaction was to invent and recommend to him alpha-beta pruning. He was unconvinced.

=See also=
 * History of Computer Chess
 * The Bernstein Chess Program

=Publications=
 * Alex Bernstein, Michael de V. Roberts (1958). Computer vs. Chess-Player. Scientific American, Vol. 198, reprinted 1988 in Computer Chess Compendium
 * Alex Bernstein (1958). A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 704. Chess Review, July 1958
 * Alex Bernstein, Michael de V. Roberts, Timothy Arbuckle, Martin Belsky (1958). A chess playing program for the IBM 704. Proceedings of the 1958 Western Joint Computer Conference
 * Pamela McCorduck (1979). Machines Who Think. W. H. Freeman
 * Pamela McCorduck (2004). Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. A. K. Peters (25th anniversary edition)

=Forum Posts=
 * The mystery of Alex Bernstein by Sergei S. Markoff, CCC, June 06, 2019
 * Re: The mystery of Alex Bernstein by Sergei S. Markoff, CCC, June 09, 2019
 * Re: The mystery of Alex Bernstein by Elizabeth Rand, CCC, July 17, 2020
 * Re: The mystery of Alex Bernstein by Sergei S. Markoff, CCC, July 18, 2020
 * Re: The mystery of Alex Bernstein by Elizabeth Rand, CCC, July 18, 2020

=External Links=
 * Alex Bernstein from The Computer History Museum
 * Photos with Edward Lasker by Andreas Feininger, Getty Images » Quote from Machines Who Think
 * Runner-Up - The New Yorker, November 29, 1958
 * The History of Computer Chess - Part 3 - Alex Bernstein by Simon Williams, Chess.com, August 31, 2019
 * The History of Computer Chess - Part 4 - Alex Bernstein continued... by Simon Williams, Chess.com, September 28, 2019
 * Alex Bernstein: juega al ajedrez con un IBM 704 (Thinking Machines) YouTube Video

=References= Up one level