David Levy (chess player)

David Levy, Pamplona 2009
Surname	David Neil Lawrence Levy
Association	Scotland
Born	March 14, 1945 London , United Kingdom
title	International champion (1969)
Current  Elo rating	2289 (April 2020)
Best Elo rating	2360 (July 1971)
Tab at the FIDE (English)

David Neil Lawrence Levy (born March 14, 1945 in London ) is a Scottish chess master and computer expert.

chess

Chess 4.7 - David Levy
Toronto 1978, 4th match game

	a	b	c	d	e	f	G	H
8th									8th
7th									7th
6th									6th
5									5
4th									4th
3									3
2									2
1									1
	a	b	c	d	e	f	G	H

Position after 55. Rd7 – c7: Levy, as Black, gave up.

Levy won the Scottish Championship in 1968 and 1975 and played for the Scottish team at all six consecutive Chess Olympiads between 1968 and 1978 . In 1969 - after his good results at the zone tournament in Portugal - he was awarded the title of International Master by the World Chess Federation FIDE . He is listed as inactive at FIDE because he has not played a rated game since 1978.

Computer chess

Levy attracted international attention in 1968 with his bet that he would not lose a competition against any computer chess program for the next ten years . He won a match over five games against the strongest program Chess 4.7 in Toronto in 1978 with 3.5: 1.5, but he was the first chess master who had to give a draw against a chess program (1st match game) or even lost (see diagram). Chess 4.7 was running on a mainframe computer (a Control Data Cyber ​​176 ) in Minnesota, the moves were transmitted over the phone. The machine was able to calculate about 3,000 positions per second (for comparison: a commercial PC chess program of today has about 2 million positions).

In 1989 Levy had no chance against the Deep Thought program and lost a competition 4-0.

further activities

In the early 1970s Levy taught " ALGOL Programming" and " Artificial Intelligence " at the University of Glasgow . In 1997, Levy won the Loebner Prize as the leader of his team for developing the program with the most human-like behavior ( see also: Turing test ).

David Levy is co-founder of the Mind Sports Organization (MSO) and together with Raymond Keene and Tony Buzan formed its board of directors as well as co-founder of the International Computer Games Association (ICGA), of which he was president twice, from 1986 to 1992 and from 1999 to the end of 2018, was. In this context he is the organizer of the "Mind Sports" Olympiad (since 1997), which includes chess as well as competitions such as Go , Scrabble and memory disciplines.

David Levy has authored more than forty books on chess and computers.

Works (selection)

• Chess and computers . Batsford, London 1976, ISBN 0-7134-3178-4 .
• Learn chess from the world champions . Pergamon Press, Oxford 1979, ISBN 0-08-021387-1 .
• (With Raymond Keene): How to Play the Opening in Chess . Batsford, London 1993, ISBN 0-8050-2937-0 .
• (With Kevin O'Connell): How to Play King's Indian. Rau, Düsseldorf 1992, ISBN 3-7919-0197-4 .
• Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships . B&T, 2007, ISBN 978-0-06-135975-0 .

Web links

• Information on Levy and games against Chess 4.7 ( Memento from November 9, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
• Replayable chess games by David Levy on chessgames.com (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ David Levy's results at the Chess Olympiads on olimpbase.org (English)
2. ↑ A new president , accessed on July 19, 2020