Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner

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Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner, an Israeli statistician and computer scientist with M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Bar-Ilan University, and associate professor in CS at the Jerusalem College of Technology. His research interests include Torah and science, artificial intelligence, case-based processing, game playing and computer chess with focus on computerized chess composers.

=Chess Composer=

Bitboards
In their paper A Chess Composer of Two-Move Mate Problems, which received the ICGA Journal Award, Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner and Fridel Fainshtein describe their model called Chess Composer, which utilizes Bitboard move generation. Sliding piece attacks were generated by a hybrid none rotated approach of rank lookups and the classical approach along with some bit-twiddling.

Abstract
Computerized chess composers of mate problems are rare. Moreover, so far they do not produce either impressive or creative new mate problems. In this paper, we describe a model called CHESS COMPOSER. This model uses a 64-bit representation, an ordered version of Iterative-Deepening Depth-First Search, and a quality function built with the help of two international masters in chess-problem composition. The result is applied on 100 known problems. It shows that the quality of 97 problems has been improved. Some of the improvements are rather impressive considering that most of the tested problems were composed by experienced composers. The new, improved problems can be regarded as creative from the viewpoint of experts in chess compositions, because (1) they seem to be better, and (2) they are not too similar to the original problems.

=Selected Publications=
 * Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner (1994). Case-Based Evaluation in Computer Chess. EWCBR 1994
 * Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner (1995). Learning Strategies for Explanation Patterns: Basic Game Patterns with Application to Chess. ICCBR-95
 * Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner, Nahum Cohen, Erez Shasha (1999). An Improver of Chess Problems. Cybernetics and Systems, Vol. 30, No. 5
 * Fridel Fainshtein, Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner (2006). A Chess Composer of Two-Move Mate Problems. ICGA Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1, pdf
 * Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner, Fridel Fainshtein (2006). A Deep Improver of Two-move Chess Mate Problems. Cybernetics and Systems, Vol. 37, No. 5

=External Links=
 * Home Page of Prof. Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner
 * Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner‬ - ‪Google Scholar‬

=References= Up one level