Maarten van Emden

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Maarten van Emden

Maarten H. van Emden,
a Dutch mathematician, electrical engineer and computer scientist. He defended his Ph.D. thesis in Information theory and Data analysis in 1971 at University of Amsterdam under Adriaan van Wijngaarden. He held research positions at the IBM T.J. Watson Laboratory and the University of Edinburgh, before he went to Canada to teach and research in programming at University of Waterloo and University of Victoria. Maarten van Emden is proponent of the declarative logical and constraint programming language Prolog. He wrote an advice-taking Prolog program for certain chess endgames . Along with Robert Kowalski, Van Emden developed the fixpoint semantics of Horn clauses, which underpin the logical semantics of logic programming . He further researched on software verification and correctness, and constraint satisfaction, along with interval arithmetic and interval propagation.

Quotes

Maarten van Emden

From I remember Donald Michie :

To accommodate a driven student with his own project requires a supervisor who is not one of those lowly beavers. In the case of Schaeffer it was Morven Gentleman. When Gentleman left, the nearly finished Schaeffer was transferred to Randy Goebel and myself. As a result, he is, pro forma, my most famous student. ...

Donald Michie demonstrated the Human Window phenomenon with chess end games. He proposed a form of describing end-game knowledge that he called “advice” and described a formal language, Advice Language One  , for expressing such advice. The language could be translated into a form that guided a computer to play the end-game at the level of skill of a chess expert. Soei Tan, Ivan Bratko and Danny Kopec were chess experts who used this framework to implement specific end games.

Once again, I did not get it. I could not help acting in my then usual role of Prolog evangelist and wanted to demonstrate that the beauty of Prolog was that it rendered superfluous things like Advice Language One. Accordingly I wrote a Prolog program that played an end game using Advice in DM’s sense . DM generously allowed me my say in a paper in the Tenth Machine Intelligence workshop. It’s a nice paper, but it does not get it. 

Alejandro López-Ortiz

From An Introduction to Computer Chess  :

From the team of undergrads who authored Ribbit, Ron Hansen went on to write his master thesis on computer chess, and eventually Prof. Van Emden became an expert in computer chess and endgames. 

Selected Publications

1970 ...

• Maarten van Emden (1970). Increasing the efficiency of quicksort. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 9
• Maarten van Emden (1970). Algorithms 402: Increasing the efficiency of quicksort. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 11
• Maarten van Emden (1971). An Analysis of Complexity. Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam, advisor Adriaan van Wijngaarden
• Maarten van Emden (1971). Optimal data compression. Machine Intelligence, Vol. 6
• Maarten van Emden, Robert Kowalski (1976). The Semantics of Predicate Logic as a Programming Language. Journal of the ACM, Vol. 23, No. 4, pdf
• Maarten van Emden (1977). Computations and Deductive Information Retrieval. CS-77-16, University of Waterloo, pdf
• Maarten van Emden (1977). Relational Equations, Grammars, and Programs. CS-77-17, University of Waterloo, pdf
• Maarten van Emden (1977). Programming with resolution logic. Machine Intelligence, Vol. 8

1980 ...

• Maarten van Emden (1982). An Algorithm for Interpreting Prolog Programs. ICLP 1982
• Maarten van Emden (1982). Chess End-game Advice: a Case Study in Computer Utilisation of Knowledge. Machine Intelligence, Vol. 10
• Maarten van Emden (1986). Quantitative Deduction and its Fixpoint Theory. Journal of Logic Programming, Vol. 3, No. 1, CiteSeerX
• Maarten van Emden (1987). First-order Predicate Logic as a Common Basis for Relational and Functional Programming. LICS 1987
• Maarten van Emden, Péter Szeredi (1988). Converting AND-Control to OR-Control by Program Transformation. Foundations of Deductive Databases and Logic Programming, Morgan Kaufmann

1990 ...

• Mantis H. M. Cheng, Maarten van Emden, B. E. Richards (1990). On Warren's Method for Functional Programming in Logic. ICLP 1990
• Maarten van Emden (1992). Rhetoric versus Modernism in Computing. Journal of Logic and Computation, Vol. 2
• Maarten van Emden (1992). Structured Inspections of Code. Software Testing, Verification & Reliability, Vol. 2
• Mantis H. M. Cheng, Douglas Stott Parker Jr., Maarten van Emden (1995). A Method for Implementing Equational Theories as Logic Programs. ICLP 1995, pdf
• Maarten van Emden (1999). Algorithmic Power from Declarative Use of Redundant Constraints. Constraints, Vol. 4, No 4

2000 ...

• Maarten van Emden (2001). Factored Notation for Interval I/O. arXiv:cs/0102023
• Maarten van Emden (2002). On the Significance of Digits in Interval Notation. arXiv:cs/0201015
• Maarten van Emden (2002). New Developments in Interval Arithmetic and Their Implications for Floating-Point Standardization. arXiv:cs/0210015
• Maarten van Emden, Belaid Moa (2006). Computational Euclid. arXiv:cs/0606036
• Maarten van Emden (2006). Set-Theoretic Preliminaries for Computer Scientists. arXiv:cs/0607039
• William W. Edmonson, Maarten H. van Emden (2008). Interval Semantics for Standard Floating-Point Arithmetic. arXiv:0810.4196
• Maarten van Emden (2009). Elements of Programming. Third edition, published by Andromeda Research Associates, ISBN: 978-0-9784993-0-3

2010 ...

• Maarten van Emden, André Vellino (2010). From Chinese Room to Human Window. ICGA Journal, Vol. 33, No. 3
• Maarten van Emden, André Vellino (2011). Understanding the Human Window. ICGA Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1
• Maarten van Emden (2011). Matrix Code. arXiv:1109.5416
• Maarten van Emden (2012). Discovering Algorithms with Matrix Code. arXiv:1203.2296
• Maarten van Emden (2012). Programming in logic without Prolog. arXiv:1206.2037
• Maarten van Emden (2014). Logic programming beyond Prolog. arXiv:1412.3480
• Maarten van Emden (2015). The lambda mechanism in lambda calculus and in other calculi. arXiv:1503.00375
• Maarten van Emden (2018). Beyond Structured Programming. arXiv:1810.11673
• Maarten van Emden (2018). Correct by construction. arXiv:1812.09411
• Maarten van Emden (2019). Egyptian multiplication and some of its ramifications. arXiv:1901.10961

External Links

• Homepage Maarten van Emden
• A Programmers Place, Essays by Maarten van Emden
  • I remember Edsger Dijkstra (1930 – 2002) » Edsger W. Dijkstra
  • I remember Donald Michie (1923 – 2007) » Donald Michie
• Maarten van Emden - The Mathematics Genealogy Project

References

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