Career
He was born in Keelung, Taiwan, and came to US after graduating from National Taiwan University with B.S. in E.E.. He started his graduate work at Carnegie Mellon University in the field of computer chess in the year 1985. In 1988 he was part of the "Deep Thought" team that won the Fredkin Intermediate Prize for Deep Thought's Grandmaster-level performance. In 1989 he joined IBM to design a chess-playing computer and received a Ph.D. with honors from Carnegie Mellon University.
In 1991, the Association for Computing Machinery awarded him a Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work on Deep Blue. In 1996, the supercomputer lost to world chess champion Garry Kasparov. After the loss, Hsu's team prepared for a re-match. During the re-match with Kasparov, the supercomputer had double the processing power it had during the previous match. On May 11 1997, Kasparov lost the sixth and final game, and, with it, the match (2½-3½).
Prior to building the supercomputer Deep Blue that defeated Kasparov, Hsu worked on many other chess computers. He started with ChipTest, a simple chess-playing chip, based on a design from Unix-inventor's Ken Thompson's Belle, and very different from the other chess-playing computer being developed at Carnegie Mellon, HiTech, which was developed by Hans Berliner and included 64 different chess chips for the move generator instead of the one in Hsu's series. Hsu went on to build the successively better chess-playing computers Deep Thought, Deep Thought II, and Deep Blue Prototype.
Hsu now manages the platforms and devices center of Microsoft Research Asia, in Beijing. He has stated the view that brute-force computation has eclipsed humans in chess, and it could soon do the same in the ancient Asian game of Go.
Read more about this topic: Feng-hsiung Hsu
Famous quotes containing the word career:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)