Duane Allen Szafron, a Canadian mathematician and professor of computing science at University of Alberta with a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo in 1978 on the topic of inhomogeneous cosmology. He has been doing research in object-oriented computing since 1980, including language design, language implementation, programming environments and parallel computing. His current research interests are in computer games, especially believable characters in computer games and computer poker [1]. It was in winter 1988, when Duane Szafron along with Joe Culberson asked Jonathan Schaeffer the innocent question "Jonathan, what ever happened to computer checkers?" [2], yielding to the development of Chinook and solving Checkers [3].
Duane Szafron [4]

Selected Publications

1975 ...

• Duane Szafron (1975). Exact Equations for an Ideal Fluid in Stationary Equilibrium. Physics Review D, Vol. 12
• Duane Szafron (1978). Inhomogeneous Cosmologies. Ph.D. thesis, University of Waterloo
• Christopher B. Collins, Duane Szafron (1979). A New Approach to Inhomogeneous Cosmologies: Instinsic Symmetries I. Journal of Mathematical Physics, Vol. 20
• Duane Szafron, Christopher B. Collins (1979). A New Approach to Inhomogeneous Cosmologies: Instinsic Symmetries II, Conformally Flat Slices and an Invariant Classification. Journal of Mathematical Physics, Vol. 20
• Christopher B. Collins, Duane Szafron (1979). A New Approach to Inhomogeneous Cosmologies: Instinsic Symmetries III, Conformally Flat Slices and their Analysis. Journal of Mathematical Physics, Vol. 20

1980 ...

• Duane Szafron (1981). Intrinsic Isometry Groups in General Relativity. Journal of Mathematical Physics, Vol. 22
• Duane Szafron, John Adria, Brian Wilkerson (1984). General User Interactive Design Environment: An Overview. CIPS/ACI Congress 84, pdf
• Duane Szafron, Brian Wilkerson (1986). Some Effects of Graphical Interfaces in Programming Environements. CIPS/ACI Congress 86, pdf

1990 ...

• Jonathan Schaeffer, Joe Culberson, Norman Treloar, Brent Knight, Paul Lu, Duane Szafron (1991). Checkers Program to Challenge for World Championship. SIGART Bulletin, Vol. 2, No. 2
• Jonathan Schaeffer, Joe Culberson, Norman Treloar, Brent Knight, Paul Lu, Duane Szafron (1991). Reviving the Game of Checkers. Heuristic Programming in Artificial Intelligence 2
• Jonathan Schaeffer, Joe Culberson, Norman Treloar, Brent Knight, Paul Lu, Duane Szafron (1992). A World Championship Caliber Checkers Program. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 53, Nos. 2-3, CiteSeerX
• Jonathan Schaeffer, Paul Lu, Duane Szafron, Rob Lake (1993). A Re-examination of Brute-force Search. Intelligent Games: Planning and Learning. (AAAI 1993 Report FS9302, Proccedings of the AAAI Fall Symposiuem, eds. S. Epstein and R. Levinson), AAAI Press
• Darse Billings, Denis Papp, Jonathan Schaeffer, Duane Szafron (1998). Poker as a Testbed for Machine Intelligence Research. Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta
• Darse Billings, Denis Papp, Jonathan Schaeffer, Duane Szafron (1998). Opponent Modeling in Poker. AAAI/IAAI 1998,pdf

2000 ...

• Darse Billings, Aaron Davidson, Jonathan Schaeffer, Duane Szafron (2002). The Challenge of Poker. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 134, No. 1-2, pdf
• Darse Billings, Neil Burch, Aaron Davidson, Robert Holte, Jonathan Schaeffer, Terence Schauenberg, Duane Szafron (2003). Approximating Game-Theoretic Optimal Strategies for Full-scale Poker. IJCAI 2003, pdf
• Darse Billings, Aaron Davidson, Terence Schauenberg, Neil Burch, Michael Bowling, Robert Holte, Jonathan Schaeffer, Duane Szafron (2004). Game-Tree Search with Adaptation in Stochastic Imperfect-Information Games. CG 2004
• Maria Cutumisu, Michael Bowling, Duane Szafron, Richard Sutton (2008). Agent Learning using Action-Dependent Learning Rates in Computer Role-Playing Games. Proceedings of the Fourth Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference, pdf
• Richard Zhao, Duane Szafron (2009). Learning Character Behaviors Using Agent Modeling in Games. AIIDE 2009, CiteSeerX
• Maria Cutumisu, Duane Szafron (2009). An Architecture for Game Behavior AI: Behavior Multi-Queues. AIIDE 2009, pdf

2010 ...

• Mike Carbonaro, Duane Szafron, Maria Cutumisu, Jonathan Schaeffer (2010). Computer-game construction: A gender-neutral attractor to Computing Science. Computers & Education 55(3), pdf
• Richard Zhao, Duane Szafron (2011). Generating Believable Virtual Characters Using Behavior Capture and Hidden Markov Models. Advances in Computer Games 13
• Richard Zhao, Duane Szafron (2014). Using Cyclic Scheduling to Generate Believable Behavior in Games. AIIDE 2014, pdf

External Links

• Duane Szafron Home Page
• The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Duane Szafron
• Duane Szafron - Google Scholar Citations
• Duane Szafron at University of Alberta - RateMyProfessors.com

References

1. ^ Duane Szafron Home Page
2. ^ Jonathan Schaeffer (1997, 2009). One Jump Ahead. 1. This Was Going to Be Easy, pp. 5
3. ^ Chinook - Solving Checkers
4. ^ Duane Szafron Home Page
5. ^ dblp: Duane Szafron
6. ^ Duane Szafron - Publication

What links here?