Murray Campbell

This article is about the computer scientist. For the columnist, see Murray Campbell (columnist).

Murray Campbell
Nationality	Canadian
Alma mater	Carnegie Mellon University
Occupation	Computer scientist
Years active	1980s-
Employer	IBM

Murray Campbell is a Canadian computer scientist known for being part of the team that created Deep Blue; the first computer to defeat a world chess champion.

Career

Chess computing

Around 1986, he and other students at Carnegie Mellon began working on Chip Test, a chess computer.[1] He was then a member of the teams that developed chess machines: HiTech and a project to culminate in Deep Blue.

Murray Campbell worked on Deep Thought at Carnegie Mellon University.[2] Deep Thought was a side project, and caught the attention of IBM.[3]

He afterwards joined IBM's team for Deep Blue, with Scientific American describing him as the IBM team's best chess player in 1996.[2]

He started working on Deep Blue in 1989,[4] he served as the AI expert.[3] In the match where Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov, in February 1997, Murray was there as an IBM computer scientist, and he moved the pieces as instructed by the computer program.[5] Deep Blue in that match became the first computer to defeat the reigning world chess champion. Kasparov had won an earlier match the previous year. (Based on text taken from a newsletter by Mike Oettel, of the Shriver Center at UMBC.)

In 1997, IBM turned down Kasparov's request for a rematch with Deep Blue, with the researchers moving on to other research areas, such as IBM Watson.[3]

Campbell visited UMBC for a speech called "IBM's Deep Blue: Ten Years After" on February 5, 2007.[6]

IBM

In 2012, he was a Senior Manager in the Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, USA.[7] In March 2016, he continued to serve as a scientist for IBM,[8] as a senior manager in IBM's Cognitive Computing division, which handles the Watson AI platform.[9] Campbell has been involved in surveillance projects related to petroleum production, disease outbreak, and financial data.^[when?] In 2017, he was a research staff member in the AI Foundations group within IBM T.J. Watson Research Center's Cognitive Computing organization.[3]

Personal life

Campbell himself played chess at near National Master strength in Canada during his student days, but has not played competitively for more than 20 years. His peak Elo rating was around 2200.

Honors and awards

In the North American Computer Chess Championship, he was a member of winning teams in 1985 (HiTech), 1987 (ChipTest), 1988 (Deep Thought), 1989 (HiTech and Deep Thought), 1990 (Deep Thought), 1991 (Deep Thought) and 1994 (Deep Thought).[10]

He won the 1989 World Computer Chess Championship as part of the winning team (Deep Thought).[11]

Campbell shared the $100,000 Fredkin Prize with Feng-hsiung Hsu and A. Joseph Hoane Jr. in 1997. The prize was awarded for developing the first computer (Deep Blue) to defeat a reigning world chess champion in a match.[12][13]

Campbell received the Allen Newell Research Excellence Medal in 1997, which cited his contributions to Deep Blue (first computer to defeat a world chess champion), Deep Thought (first Grandmaster level computer) and HiTech (first Senior Master level computer).[13][14]

Campbell was elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2012 for "significant contributions to computer game-playing, especially chess, and the associated improvement in public awareness of the AI endeavor."[15]

References

1. Newborn, M. (2003). "Testing the Water". Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence Milestone. Springer Science+Business Media New York. p. 16. doi:10.1007/978-0-387-21790-1_2. ISBN 978-0-387-21790-1.
2. Horgan, John (March 8, 1996). "The Deep Blue Team Plots Its Next Move". Scientific American. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
3. Greenemeier, Larry (June 2, 2017). "20 Years after Deep Blue: How AI Has Advanced Since Conquering Chess". Scientific American.
4. Weber, Bruce (May 5, 1997). "Computer Defeats Kasparov, Stunning the Chess Experts". The New York Times. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
5. Levy, Steven (May 23, 2017). "What Deep Blue Tells Us About AI in 2017". Wired. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
6. "IBM's Deep Blue - Ten Years After" (Press release). UMBC ebiquity. UMBC. February 5, 2007. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
7. "Distinguished ACM Speaker: Murray Campbell". Dsp.acm.org. Archived from the original on 2012-02-20. Retrieved 2012-03-12.
8. Limsamarnphun, Nophakhun (March 15, 2016). "Computers turning their intelligence to real-life human issues". The Nation. Thailand. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
9. Byford, Sam (March 12, 2016). "Deep Blue developer speaks on how to beat Go and crack chess". The Verge.
10. Newborn, Monty (1997). Kasparov versus Deep Blue: Computer Chess Comes of Age. New York: Springer-Verlag. p. 285. ISBN 0-387-94820-1.
11. Newborn, Monty (2003). Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence Milestone. New York: Springer-Verlag. p. 20. ISBN 0-387-95461-9.
12. "The $100,000 Fredkin Prize for Computer Chess To Be Awarded To Deep Blue's Inventors at AAAI '97". Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. 25 July 1997. Retrieved 11 April 2013.
13. Hamilton, Carol McKenna; Hedberg, Sara (1997). "Modern Masters of an Ancient Game". AI Magazine. 18 (4): 11–12. Retrieved 13 April 2013.
14. "The Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence". Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. Archived from the original on 11 June 2011. Retrieved 11 April 2013.
15. "Elected AAAI Fellows". Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved 11 April 2013.

External links

• Home page at IBM Research