October 29 1991
The Miami Herald, Miami, Florida, Tuesday, October 29, 1991
Computer unravels chess knot
Newsday
Making 7.7 billion chess moves in five hours, a supercomputer in Los Alamos, N.M., has proved that a bishop a rook and a king can defeat a king and two knights.
The discovery shot down a 300-year-old theory that such a chess matchup perfectly played would always end in a draw, experts said.
Lewis Stiller, a 25-year-old graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, wrote the 10,000-line computer program at night while working by day at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico this summer.
Chess experts and computer scientists said Stiller's program was noteworthy in both fields.
“He is a genius,” said Hans Berliner a chess player and computer scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Berliner said the longest chess position anyone had been able to “prove” before on a computer was 80 to 90 moves.
Stiller designed a creative approach to programming massively parallel computers supercomputers that rely on thousands of microprocessors to solve problems.
The program farmed out portions of the chess problem to each processor which was programmed to the configuration of three pieces on the board and compute the positions of the other three as a variable.
Berliner said Stiller's approach to programming had applicability to structural dynamics and analytic chemistry among other fields. He likened his creative programming to the discovery of a new element.
