Stanislaw Ulam

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Stanislaw Ulam

Stanisław Marcin Ulam, (April 13, 1909 – May 13, 1984)
a Polish mathematician, known for his participation in the Manhattan Project , the Teller-Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons and the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam experiment. A group of H-bomb researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory around Stanislaw Ulam, Paul Stein, Mark Wells and John Pasta developed the chess-playing program for the MANIAC I by John von Neumann and Nicholas Metropolis. It played Los Alamos Chess on a 6×6 board without bishops.

Quotes

Fred Guterl

by Fred Guterl from Silicon gambit  :

The government laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, got hold of one of the first computers, MANIAC I, so that Ulam and the other H-bomb researchers wouldn't have to stay up nights solving their voluminous equations with pencil and paper. Ulam, who described himself modestly as a "fair" chess player, couldn't resist putting the machine to work on a project of somewhat less import to coldwar strategy. Together with physicist Paul Stein, he wrote one of the first chess-playing programs. 

Aviezri Fraenkel

by Aviezri Fraenkel  :

The late Stanislaw Ulam invented the Monte Carlo method in 1949 in order to solve problems in nuclear physics (see Metropolis and Ulam, 1949), while working at the Manhattan project developing nuclear weapons, and contributing to the major breakthroughs of their time. In fact, the idea occurred to him in 1946, while trying to estimate the chances of winning Canfield solitaire. Even much before Ulam, Enrico Fermi, Buffon (the “needle experiment”), and others experimented with precursors of the method.

The Monte Carlo method has since been used extensively and successfully in space-shuttle re-entry aerodynamics, operations research, physical chemistry, numerical integration, finance and many more, in addition to physics. I was glad to see that the ideas of Stan Ulam on games and physics re-emerged after almost 70 years. Stan was a theoretical mathematician, but excelled also in applied math, physics and biology, and was involved with the early 6 x 6 computer chess program. Above all, he was extraordinarily original. 

John McCarthy

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.

Selected Publications

• Nicholas Metropolis, Stanislaw Ulam (1949). The Monte Carlo Method. Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 44, No. 247, pdf
• Paul Stein, Stanislaw Ulam (1957). Experiments in chess on electronic computing machines. Chess Review, 13 January 1957.
• James Kister, Paul Stein, Stanislaw Ulam, William Walden, Mark Wells (1957). Experiments in Chess. Journal of the ACM, Vol. 4, No. 2
• Mary Tsingou-Menzel, Paul Stein, Stanislaw Ulam (1959). Quadratic Transformations: Part I. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory report LA-2305, republished in Stanislaw Ulam (1990). Analogies Between Analogies: The Mathematical Reports of S.M. Ulam and his Los Alamos Collaborators. Berkeley: University of California Press
• Stanislaw Ulam (1976). Adventures of a mathematician. amazon.com, University of California Press
• Stanislaw Ulam (1986). Science, Computers, and People - From the Tree of Mathematics. edited by Mark C. Reynolds, Gian-Carlo Rota (eds), Birkhäuser

Paul Stein (1986). Experiments in Chess on Electronic Computing Machines: Some Early Efforts.

• Nicholas Metropolis (1987). The Beginning of the Monte Carlo Method. Los Alamos Science Special, pdf
• Editor (1987). Stanislaw Ulam 1909-1984. Los Alamos Science, No. 15

Gian-Carlo Rota (1987). The Lost Café. pdf

Paul Stein (1987). Iteration of Maps, Strange Attractors, and Number Theory - An Ulamian Potpourri. pdf

• Necia Grant Cooper (ed.) (1989). From Cardinals to Chaos: Reflections on the Life and Legacy of Stanislaw Ulam. Cambridge University Press
• Stanislaw Ulam (1990). Analogies Between Analogies: The Mathematical Reports of S.M. Ulam and his Los Alamos Collaborators. Berkeley: University of California Press
• Aviezri Fraenkel (2013). Reflection. ICGA Journal, Vol. 36, No. 1 » Monte-Carlo Tree Search

See also

• History of Computer Chess
• MANIAC I

External Links

• Stanislaw Ulam from Wikipedia
• The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Stanisław Ulam
• Human-Level AI is harder than it seemed in 1955 by John McCarthy
• Ulam, Stanislaw Marcin (1909-1984) from The Internet Encyclopedia of Science
• Quotations by Stanislaw Ulam
• Paternity of the H-Bombs: Soviet-American Perspectives by Gennady Gorelik
• Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou problem from Wikipedia
• Ulam's game from Wikipedia
• Ulam number from Wikipedia

Lucky number from Wikipedia

• Ulam's packing conjecture from Wikipedia
• Ulam spiral from Wikipedia

References

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