Life and Career
Levy was born in London. He won the London Junior Chess Championship in 1965 and 1966. He won the Scottish Chess Championship in 1968. He tied for fifth place at the 1969 Praia da Rocha Zonal tournament, scoring over two-thirds and thereby obtaining the title of International Master. He played on Board One for the Scottish team at the 1972 Chess Olympiad in Skopje, Yugoslavia, scoring six wins, five draws, and seven losses (47.2%).
Levy became a professional chess writer in 1971, and has been prolific. Several of his books were co-written with English Grandmaster and prolific chess author Raymond Keene. Levy also married Keene's sister. He has functioned as literary agent for the escaped Great Train robber, Ronald Biggs.
In the late 1970s, Levy consulted with Texas Instruments on the development of the Chess module for the TI-99/4A Home Computer Project.
In 1997, he led the team that won the Loebner Prize for the program called "CONVERSE". The prize competition rewards the program that is best able to simulate human communication. Levy entered the contest again in 2009, and won.
Since 1999, he has been the president of the International Computer Games Association. He was Chairman of the Rules and Arbitration Committee for the Kasparov vs Deep Junior chess match in New York in 2003.
Levy once started a business called Tiger Computer Security with a famous computer hacker, Mathew Bevan. Now he is the Chief Executive Officer of Intelligent Toys Ltd, a London-based company that develops toys that incorporate AI.
Levy also wrote Love and Sex with Robots, published in the United States in 2007 by HarperCollins, and forthcoming from Duckworth in the UK. It is the commercial edition of his Ph.D. thesis, which he defended successfully on 11 October 2007, at Maastricht University, The Netherlands. On 17 January 2008, he appeared on the late night television show The Colbert Report to promote his book. In September 2009, Levy predicted that sex robots would hit the market within a couple of years.
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