Murray Campbell
Research Scientist, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Earlier this year, Deep Blue became the first computer to defeat the World Chess Champion in a regulation match, thereby fulfilling a long-standing challenge in computer science. Many factors contributed to Deep Blue's success, including a single-chip chess accelerator, a large-scale parallel system, selective search algorithms and a complex evaluation function. This talk will examine some of these factors and place them in the context of the nearly 50 years of computer chess research. In addition, this talk will explore some of the many questions about machine and human intelligence that have been prompted by Deep Blue's win.
Murray Campbell is a research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He is a member of the team that developed Deep Blue, the first computer to defeat the World Chess Champion in a regulation match, for which Campbell was awarded the Fredkin prize and the Allen Newell Research Excellence Medal. Deep Blue and its predecessor machines have won many other awards and distinctions, including first computer to defeat a Grandmaster in tournament play, the Fredkin Intermediate Prize for the first Grandmaster-level chess computer and the OMNI Challenge Prize.
Campbell received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Alberta (1979, 1981), and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (1987). Involved with computer chess research for more than 15 years, Campbell has co-authored numerous papers, and is also an expert chess player as well as a former chess champion of Alberta. His current research interests include data mining and parallel algorithms.