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In the mid-1980s, work began at Bell Labs on a new operating system as a replacement for Unix. Thompson was instrumental in the design and implementation of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs, a new operating system utilizing principles of Unix, but applying them more broadly to all major system facilities.
In the early 1980s Ken Thompson, working at the Bell Laboratories, generated one of the world’s first chess endgame databases — king and queen vs king and rook. At the time he explained to Frederic Friedel how this revolutionary new technology worked.
- A Brief History
- From Zero to Six in ...
- The Next Evolution: Edwards and Nalimov
- Syzygy Arrives
The first steps toward the creation of tablebases came from the noted applied mathematician Richard Bellman, who proposed building a database to solve chess and checkers endgames using retrograde analysis. Although not properly analysis, the idea was to analyze backwards from the simplest positions (i.e. three pieces, which include the two kings) a...
Then in 1991, the next step was taken when Lewis Stiller built the first six-piece database using a computer with 65,536 processors working in parallel. The endgame of choice was rook and bishop vs two knights. The computer generated 100 billion legal positions, and Stiller used the method pioneered by Ken Thompson, described in detail in the artic...
In spite of this, progress in completing the entire six-piece files was slow. Thompson’s tablebases were the first foray but had problems that made it unusable within a program’s search. This was solved by Steven Edwards, who built a set in the early 90s for his program ‘Spector’ using a new design, and coding, that addressed the shortcomings. Afte...
It would take a few years, but the next big leap came in 2013 when Ronald de Man announced in a specialized computer chess forum (much as Nalimov had done) the creation of a new tablebase generator with new ideas. Ronald is a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist who got a silver medal in the 1990 International Mathematical Olympiad (for examp...
In 1977, Ken Thompson's KQKR tablebase was used in a match against Grandmaster Walter Browne. [16] [17] Thompson and others helped extend tablebases to cover all four- and five-piece endgames, including KBBKN, KQPKQ, and KRPKR. [18] [19] Lewis Stiller published a thesis with research on some six-piece tablebase endgames in 1991. [20] [21]
Computerrecently visited Ken Thompson at Lucent’s Bell Labs to learn about Thompson’s early work on Unix and his more recent research in distributed computing.
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On the occasion of the presentation of the Computer Society's and Hitachi's inaugural Tsutomu Kanai Award for distributed computing, Computer visited recipient Ken Thompson at Lucent's Bell Labs. We were interested in learning about Thompson's early work on Unix and his more recent work in distributed computing.
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Ken Thompson: And you know it was just a big monstrous project with GE, Bell Labs and MIT to build the time sharing system that was going to end all time sharing systems. And it was hugely over-designed
