Home * People * Christopher Strachey

		Christopher Strachey, (November 16, 1916 – May 18, 1975) was a British computer scientist and pioneer in computer and programming language design, between 1952 and 1959 ‎technical officer in the National Research Development Corporation, between 1962 and 1965 fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and from 1966 ‎leader of the Programming Research Group, Oxford University [1], where he worked with Dana Scott and Joe Stoy, constituting the Scott-Strachey approach to denotational semantics [2]. Strachey had a major role in the development of the Elliot 401 and Ferranti Pegasus computers, being responsible for its logical design. In the early 1960s, along with Maurice Wilkes at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, he was involved in the development of the Titan or Atlas 2 [3] , and developed the Combined Programming Language (CPL) [4] . His influential fundamental concepts in programming languages formalized the distinction between L- and R- values [5] . In 1959, Strachey wrote one of the first seminal papers on Time-sharing [6] [7] [8]. In his 1961 paper Bitwise operations [9] he already proposed a parallel prefix bit reversal algorithm [10].
Christopher Strachey [11]

Checkers

Strachey wrote the first successful AI program, his checkers (draughts) program for the Ferranti Mark 1 at the University of Manchester, after first trials on Turing's Pilot ACE at National Physical Laboratory in 1950/1951 exhausted its memory. By the summer of 1952 the program could play a complete game of checkers at a reasonable speed ^{[12] [13] [14]}, and also played “God Save the King” on completion ^{[15] [16]}, and already featured Bitboards for White, Black and Kings to represent the board ^[17]. His checkers program from 1966 ^[18] written in CPL is available on-line, in a corrected version with courtesy of Peter Norvig ^{[19] [20]}.

Love Letters

		In 1952, Christopher Strachey used the built-in random number generator of the Ferranti Mark 1 [21] to generate texts that are intended to express and arouse emotions, the Strachey love letters by M.U.C. (Manchester University Computer), recently broached by David Link [22] [23] [24]. One sample from Matt Sephton's [25] Loveletter Generator, a reimplementation of Strachey 's algorithm from 1952 [26]: Beloved Dear, My anxious rapture clings to your craving infatuation. My unsatisfied hunger impatiently longs for your winning ardour. You are my anxious heart, my burning rapture, my tender little liking. Yours curiously, M.U.C.
Love's Messenger [27]

Selected Publications

^{[28] [29]}

• Christopher Strachey (1952). Logical or non-mathematical Programs. Proceedings of the ACM Conference, Toronto, reprinted in David Levy (ed.) (1988). Computer Games I.
• Christopher Strachey (1959). Time sharing in large, fast computers. IFIP Congress 1959
• Christopher Strachey (1961). Bitwise operations. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 4, No. 3 ^[30]
• Christopher Strachey, Maurice Wilkes (1961). Some Proposals for Improving the Efficiency of ALGOL 60. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 4, No. 11
• David W. Barron, John Buxton ^[31] , David Hartley, Eric Nixon, Christopher Strachey (1963). The main features of CPL. The Computer Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2
• Christopher Strachey (1965). An impossible program (Correspondence). The Computer Journal, Vol. 7, No. 4
• Christopher Strachey (1965). A General Purpose Macrogenerator. The Computer Journal, Vol. 8, No. 3
• Christopher Strachey (1966). Towards a Formal Semantics. North-Holland
• Christopher Strachey (1966). System Analysis and Programming. Scientific American, September 1966, republished August 23, 2011
• Christopher Strachey (1967, 2000). Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages. Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, Vol. 13: 11–49
• Dana Scott, Christopher Strachey (1971). Toward an Mathematical Semantics for Computer Languages. pdf
• Robert Milne, Christopher Strachey (1977). Theory of Programming Language Semantics. Part A & B. Chapman & Hall, ISBN-13: 978-0412142604, amazon.com, oldcomputerbooks.com

External Links

• Christopher Strachey from Wikipedia
• The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Christopher Strachey
• Pioneer Profiles - Christopher Strachey by David Barron, Resurrection - The Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society
• Programming ENTER: Christopher Strachey‘s Draughts Program by David Link
• Complete Annotated Strachey Checkers Program by Peter Norvig
• Christopher Strachey Biography from BookRags
• The Strachey Lectures in Computing Science at Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
• C. Strachey : Software Engineering Techniques 1969
• Grand Text Auto » Christopher Strachey: The first digital artist?
• Strachey family of Sutton Court, Somerset from Wikipedia
  Lytton Strachey from Wikipedia (uncle of Christopher Strachey)
• Christopher Strachey’s Nineteen-Fifties Love Machine by Siobhan Roberts, The New Yorker, February 14, 2017

References

1. ^ Christopher Strachey - I13799 - Individual Information - PhpGedView
2. ^ Joe Stoy (1981). Denotational Semantics: The Scott-Strachey Approach to Programming Language Theory. MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262690768
3. ^ Ferranti Computing Systems Atlas 2 Brochure: August 1963 from Atlas Computer Laboratory, Chilton: 1961-1975
4. ^ CPL also dubbed as Cambridge + London or Christopher's (Strachey) Private Language, London Atlas, Additional Material from Atlas Computer Laboratory
5. ^ Christopher Strachey (1967, 2000). Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages. Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, Vol. 13: 11–49
6. ^ Christopher Strachey (1959). Time sharing in large, fast computers. IFIP Congress 1959
7. ^ Reminiscences on the History of Time Sharing by John McCarthy, 1983
8. ^ Origins of Timesharing by Bob Bemer
9. ^ Christopher Strachey (1961). Bitwise operations. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 4, No. 3
10. ^ reverse.c from C code for most of the programs that appear in Hacker's Delight by Henry S. Warren, Jr.
11. ^ Pioneer Profiles - Christopher Strachey by David Barron, Resurrection - The Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society
12. ^ B. Jack Copeland, Diane Proudfoot (2011-2012). Turing, Father of the Modern Computer. The Rutherford Journal - The New Zealand Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Vol. 4 » with photos of Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Dietrich Prinz, Christopher Strachey, Jack Good, Arthur Samuel, Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, ...
13. ^ artificial intelligence (AI) :: Early milestones in AI from Britannica Online Encyclopedia
14. ^ The “Modern” History of Artificial Intelligence and Programs from Neuroscience Of Intelligence
15. ^ Pioneer Profiles - Christopher Strachey by David Barron, Resurrection - The Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society
16. ^ Oldest' computer music unveiled by Jonathan Fildes, BBC News, June 17, 2008
17. ^ On Bitboards for White, Black and Kings to represent the checkers board, see David Link Video at 1:04:02
18. ^ Christopher Strachey (1966). System Analysis and Programming. Scientific American, September 1966, republished August 23, 2011
19. ^ Complete Annotated Strachey Checkers Program by Peter Norvig
20. ^ Prescient but Not Perfect: A Look Back at a 1966 Scientific American Article on Systems Analysis by Peter Norvig, August 23, 2011
21. ^ The function /W puts random digits into the twenty least significant digits of the accumulator. (The randomness is derived from a resistance noise generator) - Alan Turing (1952). Programmers' Handbook for the Manchester Electronic Computer Mark II. 2nd edition, revised by R.A. Brooker
22. ^ The Archaeology of Very Early Algorithms, 1948-58 - Christopher Strachey's Love Letter Generator by David Link, Computer Conservation Society, March 12, 2009
23. ^ LoveLetters_1.0, 2009—...: by David Link
24. ^ Strachey Love Letters from Gnoetry Daily
25. ^ Websites, widgets and other wonderful things. By Matt Sephton
26. ^ Christopher Strachey "Loveletters" (1952)
27. ^ Love's Messenger, by Marie Spartali Stillman c. 1885, at Delaware Art Museum, Love letter from Wikipedia
28. ^ The National Archives - Catalogue of the papers and correspondence of Christopher Strachey (1916 - 1975)
29. ^ DBLP: Christopher Strachey
30. ^ reverse.c from C code for most of the programs that appear in Hacker's Delight by Henry S. Warren, Jr.
31. ^ J.N. Buxton: Software Engineering Techniques 1969

What links here?

Up one level