Feng-hsiung Hsu

Feng-hsiung Hsu ^A ( Chinese  許峰雄  /  许峰雄 , Pinyin Xǔ Fēngxióng , W.-G. Hsü Feng-hsiung ; * 1959 in Keelung , Taiwan ) is a Taiwanese-American computer scientist and computer chess pioneer . In the 1990s, he headed the team at IBM that developed the Deep Blue chess computer , which in 1997 became the first computer in the world to win a chess competition under tournament conditions against the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov . In his book Behind Deep Blue - Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion ( German for example: "Behind Deep Blue  - How the computer that defeated the world chess champion came about " ) he reports in detail about the development work and this historic victory.  

Life

Born in Taiwan , he got the nickname Crazy Bird ( German  "crazy bird" ), in short: CB , as a school child , because some of his classmates thought he was eccentric . In addition , his first name Feng ( 峰 , fēng  - "summit") is a homonym for Feng ( 瘋  /  疯 , fēng  - "crazy") in standard Chinese . This nickname sticks to him to this day. After completing his college education, he emigrated to the USA in 1985 . He earned a Ph.D. ( PhD ) in the field computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh ( Pennsylvania ) for his work on computer chess .

Building on this, he developed Deep Thought ( German  "Tiefer Gedanke" ), a chess computer that won the North American Computer Chess Championship in 1988 and the World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) a year later .

In 1989, Hsu joined the IBM team and did research on parallel computing with Murray Campbell . This work resulted in the new chess supercomputer Deep Blue ( German "Tiefblau" ), the name being explained as an homage to his employer IBM, whose company color is blue and which is known in the USA as "Big Blue" . With Deep Blue , Feng-hsiung Hsu and his team achieved the historic first victory in 1997 in the competition of the “machine” - artificial intelligence - against the human chess world champion.  

Award

In 1991 Feng-hsiung Hsu received the Grace Murray Hopper Award for his contributions to the architecture and algorithms of chess computers .

Literature (selection)

• Behind Deep Blue - Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion. Princeton University Press , 2002, ISBN 0-691-09065-3

annotation

^A.The last name "Hsu" after Pinyin "Xǔ" is pronounced similarly to "Schü".

Web links

• Portrait photo , accessed November 23, 2017
• Photo Feng-hsiung Hsu receives the 1989 World Cup “Shanny” trophy from Claude Shannon , accessed on November 23, 2017

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dieter Steinwender , Frederic Friedel : Chess on the PC - Bits and Bytes in the Royal Game. Ed .: Pearson Education . Markt & Technik , 1995, ISBN 978-3-87791-522-6 , p. 92 ( preview in Google Book search).
2. ↑ THE 130 MOST INSPIRING ASIAN AMERICANS OF ALL TIME - Computer Scientist Feng-hsiung Hsu . In: goldsea.com. Accessed November 23, 2017 . 
3. ↑ Oral History of Feng-Hsiung Hsu ( Memento from July 13, 2018 in the Internet Archive ). In: archive.computerhistory.org, accessed on November 23, 2017. (English)
4. ↑ Frederic Friedel : Summit in Hamburg in Computer Chess and Games (CSS), No. 2, 1993, p. 5