Selim Akl

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Selim G. Akl, a Canadian computer scientist and professor at Queen's University in the School of Computing, where he leads the Parallel and Unconventional Computation Group. His research interests covers algorithm design and analysis, in particular parallel and unconventional computing. He made his Ph.D. Statistical Analysis of Some Properties of Solutions to the Traveling Salesman Problem under the supervision of Monroe Newborn at McGill University in 1978, where he also researched on the principal continuation and the killer heuristic. As postdoc at Queen's University he published various papers on Parallel Search.

=Quantum Chess= Quantum Chess, a variant of the chess game invented by Selim Akl, uses the weird properties of quantum physics. Unlike the chess pieces of the conventional game, where a pawn is a pawn, and a rook is a rook, a quantum chess piece is a superposition of "states", each state representing a different conventional piece. In Quantum Chess, a player does not know the identity of a piece (that is, whether it is a pawn, a rook, a bishop, and so on) until the piece is selected for a move. Once a piece is selected it elects to behave as one of its constituent conventional pieces, but soon recovers its quantum state and returns to being a superposition of two or more pieces.

In the quantum chess computer game created by computer science student Alice Wismath (right), a piece that should be a knight could simultaneously also be a queen, a pawn or something else. Wismath based the game on an idea proposed by computer science professor Selim Akl

=Selected Publications=

1977

 * Selim Akl, Monroe Newborn (1977). The Principal Continuation and the Killer Heuristic. 1977 ACM Annual Conference Proceedings, pp. 466-473. ACM, Seattle, WA.

1980 ...

 * Selim Akl, David T. Barnard, R.J. Doran (1980). Design, Analysis and Implementation of a Parallel Alpha-Beta Algorithm. Queen's University
 * Selim Akl, David T. Barnard, R.J. Doran (1980). Simulation and Analysis in Deriving Time and Storage Requirements for a Parallel Alpha-Beta Pruning Algorithm. IEEE International Conference on Parallel Processing, pp. 231-234.
 * Selim Akl, David T. Barnard, R.J. Doran (1980). Searching Game Trees in Parallel. Proceedings of the Third Biennial Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, Victoria, B.C.
 * Selim Akl, R.J. Doran (1981). A Comparison of Parallel Implementations of the Alpha-Beta and Scout tree Search Algorithms using the game of Checkers. Queen's University
 * Selim Akl, David T. Barnard, R.J. Doran (1982). Design, Analysis, and Implementation of a Parallel Tree Search Algorithm. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol 4, No 2, pp. 192-203. ISSN 0162-8828
 * Selim Akl (1985). Parallel Sorting Algorithms. (Academic Press)
 * Selim Akl (1989). The Design and Analysis of Parallel Algorithms. (Prentice Hall)

1990 ...

 * Selim Akl, Kelly A. Lyons (1993). Parallel Computational Geometry. (Prentice Hall).
 * Selim Akl (1997). Parallel Computation: Models and Methods. (Prentice Hall).

2000 ...

 * Selim Akl (2006). Even Accelerating Machines are not Universal. Technical Report No. 2006-508, Queen's University, pdf
 * Ian Stewart, Wenying Feng, Selim Akl (2009). A Further Improvement on a Genetic Algorithm. ITNG 2009

2010 ...

 * Ian Stewart, Wenying Feng, Selim Akl (2010). Tuning Neural Networks by Both Connectivity and Size. ITNG 2010
 * Selim Akl (2010). Time Travel: A New Hypercomputational Paradigm. IJUC Vol. 6, No. 5
 * Selim Akl (2011). Bitonic Sort. Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing 2011
 * Naya Nagy, Selim Akl (2012). Computing with Uncertainty and its Implications to Universality. IJPEDS, Vol. 27, No. 2

=External Links=
 * Selim Akl's Official Home Page
 * Selim Akl from Wikipedia
 * Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universal Computer
 * Selim G Akl - Queen's University at Kingston - RateMyProfessors.com

=References=

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