Alan Kotok, (November 9, 1941 – May 26, 2006) was an American computer scientist, known for the Kotok-McCarthy-Chess Program [1][2][3], his work at Digital Equipment Corporation, and his contributions on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Between 1959 and 1962, while student under John McCarthy at MIT, Alan Kotok and his fellows Elwyn Berlekamp, Michael A. Lieberman, Charles Niessen and Robert A. Wagner wrote a chess program for the IBM 7090. Based on Alex Bernstein's 1957 program and routines by McCarthy and Paul W. Abrahams, they added alpha-beta pruning to minmax, at McCarthy's suggestion. The Kotok-McCarthy-Program was written in Fortran and FAP, the IBM 7090 macro assembler.
Alan Kotok at CSAIL in 2006 [4]

See also

• Digital Equipment Corporation
• History of Computer Chess
• Kotok-McCarthy-Program
• PDP-1
• PDP-6
• PDP-10
• Stanford-ITEP Match

Selected Publications

• Alan Kotok (1962). Artificial Intelligence Project - MIT Computation Center: Memo 41 - A Chess Playing Program. pdf
• Alan Kotok (1962). A Chess Playing Program for the IBM 7090. B.S. Thesis, MIT, AI Project Memo 41, Computation Center, Cambridge MA. pdf
• Gordon Bell, Alan Kotok, Thomas N. Hastings, Richard Hill (1978). The Evolution of the DECsystem-10. Communications of the ACM, 21(1): 44-63 » PDP-10

External Links

• Alan Kotok from Wikipedia
• Welcome to the Web site of Alan Kotok
• Tech Model Railroad Club from Wikipedia
• Alan Kotok from The Computer History Museum
• The Mouse That Roared: PDP-1 Celebration Event Lecture, May 15, 2006, (1:53:44) Mountain View, CA, USA: © 2006, The Computer History Museum. Panel discussion including Alan Kotok (53:50-1:08:40) ^[5] and John McCarthy (1:27:20), moderated by Edward Fredkin from 17:40, YouTube Video
  

References

1. ^ Alan Kotok (1962). Artificial Intelligence Project - MIT Computation Center: Memo 41 - A Chess Playing Program. pdf
2. ^ Forty five years ago by Steven Edwards, CCC, May 01, 2007
3. ^ Competitions, Controversies, and Computer Chess (pdf) by Michael Brudno (May 2000)
4. ^ Alan Kotok at CSAIL in 2006, Alan Kotok from Wikipedia
5. ^ Alan Kotok died at his home in Cambridge, apparently from a heart attack, on May 26, 2006, eleven days after the PDP-1 Celebration Event

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