Murray S. Campbell
Murray S. Campbell worked on computer chess and the Deep Blue team. Campbell conducted master’s research on parallel game-tree search at Alberta and doctoral work on decomposing chess endgames at Carnegie Mellon. He joined IBM in 1989. His contributions included position evaluation and work with grandmaster Joel Benjamin on the opening book. The team’s system defeated Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in May 1997. Campbell’s 1999 article explains how expert-game data could guide the system’s search.
Timeline
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Research before 1989
Searching and dividing chess problems
Campbell conducted master’s research with Tony Marsland on parallel game-tree search. At Carnegie Mellon, he worked with Hans Berliner on dividing chess pawn endgames into subproblems and combining their solutions.
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1989
Joining the IBM chess project
Campbell joined IBM in 1989 alongside Feng-hsiung Hsu. The developing machine became Deep Blue. Campbell developed its position-evaluation system and worked with grandmaster Joel Benjamin on the opening book. These contributions belonged to a larger hardware and software team.
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1997
Deep Blue wins the rematch
Deep Blue faced Garry Kasparov in a rematch in New York in May 1997. The system won the six-game match 3.5–2.5. The result followed improvements to evaluation, databases and computing power after Kasparov had won their 1996 match. Campbell was a member of the team that built the system.
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1999
Using expert games to guide search
In Knowledge Discovery in Deep Blue, Campbell explains how the system used a database of 700,000 grandmaster games. An automatically derived extended opening book supplied bonuses and penalties that guided search toward successful expert moves. The technique was introduced in 1991. The article proposes broader applications.
Sources and credits
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