The mystery of Alex Bernstein
Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2019 11:20 pm
It is well-known fact that the first fully functional chess-playing program was created by the team led by Alex Bernstein in 1957.
It's surprisingly little known about him personally. No birth year, no bio, almost nothing.
What I'm managed to discover:
1) He was one of the guys hired by IBM in 1956. We can find a funny details of IBM recruitment campaign in [1] and [2]. According to these sources he was "a U.S. Intercollegiate champion". However other sources doesn't support this statement. See for example [3]. May be he was confused with Sidney Norman Bernstein?
2) He was attended to the famous Darthmouth conference in 1956. According to [4] "Alex Bernstein, who came from New York to talk about the chess-playing program when he played a game of chess with McCarthy the equivalent of mano in the world of science Bernstein won, despite the fact that he’d accepted the handicap of playing blindfold. After that he produced a program to beat McCarthy when he got back to New York. Because he realized that his visit to Dartmouth didn’t coincide with that of Newell and Simon, he discovered only later that he and they had arrived independently at some of the same ideas for the problem". In McCarthy memoirs [5] we can see only "Alex Bernstein of IBM presented his chess program under construction. My reaction was to invent and recommend to him alpha-beta pruning. He was unconvinced."
3) In "New Yorker" 1958 article [6] we see: "Mr. B. admitte that he has never lost to 704. Bernstein has been playing chess since he was nine years old. He says that 704 makes excellent moves but itsn’t able to think far enough ahead. Bernstein has been too busy lately on other I.B.M. projects to play much chess with 704. “In theory, 704 was incapable of surprising me, but every so often it did,” he said. “One or twice it played so well that it rattled me.”. Not much.
4) And of course we have some photos like https://www.computerhistory.org/chess/s ... 14f6482e6/, several articles written by Bernstein himself and members of his team and even video: https://www.computerhistory.org/chess/m ... 90c26dd21/. But it doesn't help a lot.
5) I've found a short record here: https://radaris.com/p/Alex/Bernstein/ "Alex Bernstein; Lived in: Saint Louis, MO • Chesterfield, MO • Alton, IL; Work: IBM, IBM Corporation, Amdocs Limited". But I'm not even sure that this is our Alex Bernstein.
So, it's probably the time to write a letter to IBM with the hope than they will shed some light on Bernstein personality?
1. Müller, K. & Schaeffer, J. (2018). Man Vs. Machine: Challenging Human Supremacy at Chess (2. Edition). New York, NY, USA: Russell Enterprises, Incorporated. // https://books.google.ru/books?id=0GV2DwAAQBAJ
2. Ensmenger, N. (2012). The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (2. Edition). New York, NY, USA: MIT Press. // https://books.google.ru/books?id=VCcsTPQ738oC
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Ameri ... ampionship
4. Ashim Das (2005). A report on the dartmouth AI conference // http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~kopec ... nment1.rtf
5. John McCarthy (2006). The Dartmouth Workshop--as planned and as it happened // http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/slid ... node1.html
6. Andy Logan, Brendan Gill (1958). Runner-up / The New Yorker, November 29, 1958 P. 43 // https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1958 ... unner-up-4
It's surprisingly little known about him personally. No birth year, no bio, almost nothing.
What I'm managed to discover:
1) He was one of the guys hired by IBM in 1956. We can find a funny details of IBM recruitment campaign in [1] and [2]. According to these sources he was "a U.S. Intercollegiate champion". However other sources doesn't support this statement. See for example [3]. May be he was confused with Sidney Norman Bernstein?
2) He was attended to the famous Darthmouth conference in 1956. According to [4] "Alex Bernstein, who came from New York to talk about the chess-playing program when he played a game of chess with McCarthy the equivalent of mano in the world of science Bernstein won, despite the fact that he’d accepted the handicap of playing blindfold. After that he produced a program to beat McCarthy when he got back to New York. Because he realized that his visit to Dartmouth didn’t coincide with that of Newell and Simon, he discovered only later that he and they had arrived independently at some of the same ideas for the problem". In McCarthy memoirs [5] we can see only "Alex Bernstein of IBM presented his chess program under construction. My reaction was to invent and recommend to him alpha-beta pruning. He was unconvinced."
3) In "New Yorker" 1958 article [6] we see: "Mr. B. admitte that he has never lost to 704. Bernstein has been playing chess since he was nine years old. He says that 704 makes excellent moves but itsn’t able to think far enough ahead. Bernstein has been too busy lately on other I.B.M. projects to play much chess with 704. “In theory, 704 was incapable of surprising me, but every so often it did,” he said. “One or twice it played so well that it rattled me.”. Not much.
4) And of course we have some photos like https://www.computerhistory.org/chess/s ... 14f6482e6/, several articles written by Bernstein himself and members of his team and even video: https://www.computerhistory.org/chess/m ... 90c26dd21/. But it doesn't help a lot.
5) I've found a short record here: https://radaris.com/p/Alex/Bernstein/ "Alex Bernstein; Lived in: Saint Louis, MO • Chesterfield, MO • Alton, IL; Work: IBM, IBM Corporation, Amdocs Limited". But I'm not even sure that this is our Alex Bernstein.
So, it's probably the time to write a letter to IBM with the hope than they will shed some light on Bernstein personality?
1. Müller, K. & Schaeffer, J. (2018). Man Vs. Machine: Challenging Human Supremacy at Chess (2. Edition). New York, NY, USA: Russell Enterprises, Incorporated. // https://books.google.ru/books?id=0GV2DwAAQBAJ
2. Ensmenger, N. (2012). The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (2. Edition). New York, NY, USA: MIT Press. // https://books.google.ru/books?id=VCcsTPQ738oC
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Ameri ... ampionship
4. Ashim Das (2005). A report on the dartmouth AI conference // http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~kopec ... nment1.rtf
5. John McCarthy (2006). The Dartmouth Workshop--as planned and as it happened // http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/slid ... node1.html
6. Andy Logan, Brendan Gill (1958). Runner-up / The New Yorker, November 29, 1958 P. 43 // https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1958 ... unner-up-4