Arthur L. Samuel

Arthur Lee Samuel (born December 5, 1901 in Emporia , Kansas , † July 29, 1990 in Stanford , California ) was an American electrical engineer and computer scientist and a pioneer in the field of computer games and artificial intelligence .

Life

Samuel studied at Emporia College and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a master’s degree in 1926, where he was an instructor for two years. From 1928 he worked at Bell Laboratories , where he mainly worked on vacuum tubes, in World War II mainly for radar development. He invented a special tube that made it possible to switch an antenna between the function of receiver and transmitter (TR tube, T for transmit , R for receive ). After the Second World War he went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a professor in 1946 , where he was involved in the ILLIAC project for a series of early mainframe computers. But before the first Illiac computer was completed in 1949, he went to IBM in Poughkeepsie . There he developed some of the first hash tables , demonstrated the capabilities of the IBM 701 (the first commercial electronic computer from IBM) with a checkers program (Checkers variant), was involved in the development of Williams tubes as memory for computers and was one of the early Research work on the use of transistors in computers at IBM. From 1966 (when he retired from IBM) he was a professor at Stanford University . There he worked with Donald Knuth on his TeX software systems. He taught at Stanford until 1982 and continued programming until he was 86 years old. He died of complications from Parkinson's disease .

His checkers program at IBM (1956) used alpha-beta search and was adaptive, especially in its later versions - Samuel worked on it until the 1970s, developing various machine learning techniques. It was one of the first applications of artificial intelligence and it attracted a lot of attention at the time. It was also one of the first non-numerical applications of computers and Samuel's requirement for logical operations in the instruction sets was carried over into hardware development at IBM and beyond.

When Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman were putting together their anthology on the artificial intelligence, Computers and Thought , in 1961 , they asked Samuel to contribute about his game program for Checkers and asked him to add the best game in the program. Samuel took this as an opportunity to challenge the Connecticut national champions (No. 4 in the US rankings). The program won and the game was featured in the book.

Later he also worked in speech recognition.

In 1987 he received the IEEE's Computer Pioneer Award . In 1946 he received an honorary doctorate from Emporia College. He was a fellow of the IEEE, the American Physical Society , the IRE ( Institute of Radio Engineers ), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association for Computing Machinery .

He was editor of the IBM Journal of Research and Development and also played a major role in science management at IBM, for example in establishing European laboratories (with the most important one near Zurich).

Publications

AI, Where It Has Been and Where It Is Going ; IJCAI 1983
The Banishment of Paper-Work ; AI Magazine 4
Symposium on Pattern Recognition ; IFIP Congress 1962
Programming computers to play games ; Advances in Computers 1, 1960
Artificial intelligence - a frontier of automation ; 1962

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ He wrote the manual First grade TeX: a beginner's TEX manual , 1st edition, Department of Computer Science, Stanford, 1983
^ Samuel Some studies in machine learning using the game of checkers , IBM J. Res. Development, Volume 3, 1959, pp. 210-229, also in Ed Feigenbaum, Julian Feldman Computers and Thought , McGraw Hill 1961. There is also a Game against Connecticut's Checkers champion (and fourth-strongest US player at the time) that won the program.
^ IBM History 1956
↑ McGraw Hill 1963

personal data
SURNAME	Samuel, Arthur L.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Samuel, Arthur Lee (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American pioneer in the field of computer games and artificial intelligence
DATE OF BIRTH	December 5, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH	Emporia (Kansas)
DATE OF DEATH	July 29, 1990
Place of death	Stanford (California)

[1] He wrote the manual First grade TeX: a beginner's TEX manual , 1st edition, Department of Computer Science, Stanford, 1983

[2] Samuel Some studies in machine learning using the game of checkers , IBM J. Res. Development, Volume 3, 1959, pp. 210-229, also in Ed Feigenbaum, Julian Feldman Computers and Thought , McGraw Hill 1961. There is also a Game against Connecticut's Checkers champion (and fourth-strongest US player at the time) that won the program.

[3] IBM History 1956

[4] McGraw Hill 1963