Jean-Marc Alliot
Head of the Global Optimization Laboratory
Professor of computer science
This page is also available in french.
"I consider the most important trend was that computers got
considerably faster in these last 50 years. In this process, we found
that many things for which we had at best anthropomorphic solutions,
which in many cases failed to capture the real gist of a human's method,
could be done by more brute-forcish methods that merely enumerated
until a satisfactory solution was found. If this is heresy, so be it."
Hans Berliner
"It is hopeless to implement in a program thousands of special chess
rules. There will always be one important rule missing and it is
practically impossible to specify human knowledge in a precise way. To
give one example: Strong human players usually know for each type of
position how to play a king-attack (or to avoid the king attack of the
opponent). Hydra does not have this special knowledge. An important
part of the evaluation is a general king-attack-term. Basically: Which
pieces attack and defend the king. The search tries to optimize its
own and minimizes the opponents attacking chances. GM R.Huebner noted,
that Hydra plays a systematic, planned king-attack. This is not
entirely true. The program has no direct notion of a plan. The
optimization process of the search has a similar effect than the human
planning process. It is playing along a plan without having one."
The Hydra chess program team after defeating Michael Adams (world ranking #6) 5.5-0.5
I still write some code, but I mainly have students write it for me! One success of our lab is the CATS/OPAS arithmetic simulator now in used at EUROCONTROL and (I think)at the FAA.
I have been teaching computer science for quite a few years now and even wrote a book, used in different french universities.
You'll find here some elements about Air Traffic Control and Free Flight.
You can also have a look at my personal web site.