
Vint Cerf savours a life of Claude Shannon - Osiris30
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7662/full/547159a.html
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JoeDaDude
It's a known fact that Shannon was fascinated by games as a means to study
artificial intelligence. He also built many machines to play games. These
machines are now in the care of the MIT museum. I compiled a list of his game
machines in [1], though I need to fix the links to the pictures at the MIT
museum.

[1]. [https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon-
man...](https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/143233/claude-shannon-man-games-
and-machines)

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pmoriarty
One of the comments to the article you link to says:

 _" Claude Shannon was known as a strong chess player, and he was the first to
not only propose that a computer could play Chess, but to also provide details
on how that could be done. In his paper Programming a Computer for Playing
Chess published in 1950, he describes how a computer could play chess using
the minimax algorithm and a predesigned evaluation function. In so doing, he
laid the foundation for virtually all abstract computer game programs used
today."_

But according to chronology in the Computers and Chess Wikipedia article, in
1948 _" Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics describes how a chess program could
be developed using a depth-limited minimax search with an evaluation
function."_[1]

Even before that, in 1941, _" Predating comparable work by at least a decade,
Konrad Zuse develops computer chess algorithms in his Plankalkül programming
formalism. Because of the circumstances of the Second World War, however, they
were not published, and did not come to light, until the 1970s."_

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_and_chess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_and_chess)

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billforsternz
I immediately thought of a nice picture in one of Edward Lasker's wonderful
autobiographical chess books. Happily google image search retrieves it;

[https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Claude+Shannon](https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Claude+Shannon)

If I remember correctly, this relay based machine mates with king and rook
versus bare king (significantly harder than king and queen versus bare king)

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JoeDaDude
Thank you, great picture! Shannon's chess playing machine now resides at the
MIT Museum. I was able to include MIT Museum links in the referenced BGG list.
See MIT's page about the machine here:

[https://webmuseum.mit.edu/detail.php?term=Shannon&module=obj...](https://webmuseum.mit.edu/detail.php?term=Shannon&module=objects&type=keyword&x=0&y=0&kv=86329&record=24&page=1&kv=75597&record=9&module=objects)

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andrewl
James Gleick has a good bit about Shannon in his book _The Information: A
History, A Theory, A Flood._

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sn9
One of my favorite books!

Another great book that includes information on Shannon and provides context
to his work at Bell Labs is Gertner's _Idea Factory_.

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valuearb
Vint Cerf is a pretty interesting guy as well. Just found out he's responsible
for saving Mac users from discoveryd. He got sick and tired of it causing
problems, and called Tim Cook.

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Osiris30
Interesting. Do you have a link for this?

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voltagex_
This anecdote appears to have originated on a German podcast [1]

1: [https://www.macwelt.de/news/Vint-Cerf-beschwerte-sich-bei-
Co...](https://www.macwelt.de/news/Vint-Cerf-beschwerte-sich-bei-Cook-ueber-
WLAN-9794494.html) (run your adblocker).

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sohkamyung
Excerpts from the book can be found at this IEEE Spectrum article [1].
Definitely an interesting book to read.

[1] "A Man in a Hurry: Claude Shannon’s New York Years" [
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/a-man-in-a-
hurry-...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/a-man-in-a-hurry-claude-
shannons-new-york-years) ]

