Alex Bernstein

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Alex Bernstein

Alex Bernstein,
an American mathematician, chess player and IBM employee. Along with his colleagues Michael de V. Roberts, Timothy Arbuckle and Martin Belsky, Alex Bernstein was primary author of the Bernstein Chess Program for the IBM 704. Pamela McCorduck, who was married to Joseph F. Traub, interviewed Alex Bernstein as published with several details given in her seminal book Machines Who Think .

Quotes

Quote by John McCarthy from Human-Level AI is harder than it seemed in 1955 on the Dartmouth workshop:

Chess programs catch some of the human chess playing abilities but rely on the limited effective branching of the chess move tree. The ideas that work for chess are inadequate for go. Alpha-beta pruning characterizes human play, but it wasn't noticed by early chess programmers - Turing, Shannon, Pasta and Ulam, and Bernstein. We humans are not very good at identifying the heuristics we ourselves use. Approximations to alpha-beta used by Samuel, Newell and Simon, McCarthy. Proved equivalent to minimax by Hart and Levin, independently by Brudno. Knuth gives details.

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

External Links

• Alex Bernstein from The Computer History Museum
• Photos with Edward Lasker by Andreas Feininger, Getty Images » Quote from Machines Who Think
• Chess Pieces - IBM Research the Deep Blue site
• Runner-Up - The New Yorker - November 29, 1958
• Alex Bernstein: juega al ajedrez con un IBM 704 (Thinking Machines) YouTube Video

References

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