Ken Thompson

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Ken Thompson

Kenneth Lane (Ken) Thompson,
an American computer scientist and pioneer. Beside other things, best known for his contributions at the Bell Laboratories in creating the Unix operating system together with Dennis Ritchie, in 2011 awarded with the Japan Prize for their contribution .

Along with Joe Condon, Ken Thompson was creator of the chess entity Belle, the winner of the 3rd World Computer Chess Championship 1980 in Linz . From the mid 70s until 2000, Ken Thompson worked on creating Endgame Databases of up to six pieces .

Photos

Chess pioneers in Sacher Hotel Vienna, Austria 1980: Ben Mittman, Monty Newborn, Tony Marsland,
Dave Slate, David Levy, Claude Shannon, Ken Thompson, Betty Shannon, Tom Truscott

Mittman, Newborn, Thompson and Hyatt (right) at ACM 1982 in Dallas, Texas, 1982

Beal, Thompson, Newborn, and Botvinnik at 4th WCCC 1983 in New York City

Vladimir Arlazarov, Ken Thompson and Mikhail Donskoy 1992

Education

Ken Thompson, born 1943 in New Orleans Louisiana, received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and Masters degree in 1966, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the University of California, Berkeley. Thompson's Masters thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp .

Bell Labs

Along with Dennis Ritchie, Ken worked on the Multics operating system before they joined Bell Labs, where Ken remained about a quarter of a century and realized all the mentioned achievements in computer science.

Further Contributions

Beside his contributions to Unix and computer chess at the Bell Labs, Thompson developed the B programming language, a precursor to Ritchie's C, and in 1992 together with Rob Pike the UTF-8, a variable length character encoding for Unicode.

Retirement

As of December 1, 2000, Ken Thompson retired from Bell Labs to pursue flight instructing full time , which achieved honorable attention in the computer chess scene:

Quote by Jaap van den Herik in 2000 From Cognition to Perception :

This issue also records changes in the Board of ICCA. Don Beal stepped down as a Secretary-Treasurer after many years of outstanding service. He is succeeded by Hiroyuki Iida, who is expected to realise an effective broadening of our scope. Besides Don's stepping down we saw the retirement of Ken Thompson. He left Bell Laboratories after more than a quarter of a century of research and will now spend his time on his hobby, teaching amateur pilots. We thank him for the outstanding contributions he made to the world of computer chess and will pay more attention to his many merits in a next (special) issue   . 

Google

Since 2006 Ken Thompson has worked at Google Inc. in Mountain View, California as a Distinguished Engineer, and co-created Google's programming language Go .

See also

• Belle
• Depth | Diminishing Returns
• Kasparov versus Deep Thought 1989 documentary
• Reading Chess
• Thompson's Databases

Selected Publications

1970 ...

• Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie (1971). UNIX Programmer's Manual. Bell Telephone Laboratories, 5th Edition 1974 as pdf, 7th Edition 1979

1980 ...

• Ben Mittman, Tony Marsland, Monroe Newborn, Kathe Spracklen, Ken Thompson (1981). Computer chess: Master level play in 1981? ACM 81: Proceedings of the ACM '81 conference
• Ben Mittman, Ken Thompson (1981). Second World Microcomputer Chess Championship, Travemünde and Hamburg, West Germany. ICCA Newsletter, Vol. 4, No. 2
• Joe Condon, Ken Thompson (1982). Belle Chess Hardware, Advances in Computer Chess 3, Reprinted (1988) in Computer Chess Compendium
• Ken Thompson (1982). Computer Chess Strength. Advances in Computer Chess 3
• Joe Condon, Ken Thompson (1983). BELLE. Chess Skill in Man and Machine (ed. P.W. Frey), 2nd edition, pp. 201-210 (of 82-118). Springer-Verlag, New York. ISBN 0 387-90790 4 / 3-540-90790-4.
• Ken Thompson (1983). 4th World Computer Chess Championship. ICCA Journal, Vol. 6, No. 4 » WCCC 1983
• Ken Thompson (1984). Reflections on Trusting Trust, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, ACM Classic by Ken Thompson, also appears in ACM Turing Award Lectures: The First Twenty Years 1965-1985 Copyright © 1987 by the ACM press and Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms, and Viruses Copyright © 1990 by the ACM press
• John Roycroft, Ken Thompson (1986). Queen and Pawn on a2 against Queen. Chess Endgame Consultants and Publishers, London
• John Roycroft, Ken Thompson (1986). Queen and Pawn on a6 against Queen. Chess Endgame Consultants and Publishers, London
• John Roycroft, Ken Thompson (1986). Queen and Pawn on b7 against Queen. Chess Endgame Consultants and Publishers, London
• Ken Thompson (1986). Retrograde Analysis of Certain Endgames. ICCA Journal, Vol. 9, No. 3, pdf
• Ken Thompson (1986). An Example of QPvQ. ICCA Journal, Vol. 9, No. 4
• Garth Courtois Jr., Ken Thompson (1987). ACM's 18th North American Computer-Chess Championship (NACCC). Dallas, Texas, October 25-27, 1987. ICCA Journal, Vol. 10, No. 4 » ACM 1987
• Ken Thompson (1989). Results and Games - The 20th North American Computer-Chess Championship. ICCA Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4 » ACM 1989

1990 ...

• Henry S. Baird, Ken Thompson (1990). Reading Chess. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 12, No. 6, 552-559, pdf
• Ken Thompson (1990). KQPKQ and KRPKR Endings. ICCA Journal, Vol. 13, No. 4
• Ken Thompson (1990). Results and Games - The ACM 21st North American Computer-Chess Championship. ICCA Journal, Vol. 13, No. 4 » ACM 1990
• Ken Thompson (1991). Chess Endgames Vol. 1. ICCA Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1
• Ken Thompson (1991). New Results for KNPKB and KNPKN Endgames. ICCA Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1
• Ken Thompson, Jonathan Schaeffer (1995). Tributes to Tony Scherzer. ICCA Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1 » Tony Scherzer
• Jaap van den Herik (1996). Two Interviews with Ken Thompson. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 3 » Advances in Computer Chess 8
• Ken Thompson (1996). 6-Piece Endgames. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 4
• Wil Sparreboom, Hans Kuijf, Ken Thompson et al. (1996). TascBase. Rotterdam : Tasc B.V.
• Ken Thompson (1997). 6-Piece Endgames. Advances in Computer Chess 8

2000 ...

• Ken Thompson (2000). The Longest: KRNKNN in 262. ICGA Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1
• Ken Thompson (2001). CLAUDE SHANNON (1916-2001): FUNDAMENTAL CONTRIBUTIONS. ICGA Journal, Vol. 24, No. 1 » Claude Shannon
• Dennis Ritchie (2001). Ken, Unix, and Games. ICGA Journal, Vol. 24. No. 2
• Guy Haworth, Ernst A. Heinz (2001). Ken. ICGA Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2
• Jonathan Schaeffer (2001). Ken Thompson's Influence on Computer Games Research. ICGA Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2
• Jaap van den Herik (2001). The Bell Captain. ICGA Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2
• Feng-hsiung Hsu (2001). Ken Thompson and DEEP BLUE. ICGA Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2
• Ken Thompson (2004). Obituary: Michael Joseph Valvo (1942-2004). ICGA Journal, Vol. 27, No. 4 » Michael Valvo

Postings

• chess strength by Ken Thompson, net.chess, January 7, 1982 » Depth | Diminishing Returns

External Links

• Ken Thompson from Wikipedia
• Kenneth Thompson - Wikiquote
• Ken Thompson's ICGA Tournaments
• Kenneth Lane Thompson from Hotel Genius
• Middle Game: Computer Chess Comes of Age - Brute Force vs Knowledge from The Computer History Museum
• The Programmer Dress Code | CodeThinked by Justin Etheredge, December 6, 2007
• Leave the K-factor alone! by Ken Thompson, ChessBase News, May 7, 2009
• Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie win Japan 'Nobel' Prize, ChessBase News, January 26, 2011
• Ritchie & Thompson - Belle for Chess from I Programmer - programming, reviews and projects, January 26, 2011
• Ken Thompson: Moscow adventures (1) by Frederic Friedel, ChessBase News, January 04, 2020 » Mikhail Botvinnik
• Ken Thompson: Moscow adventures (2) by Frederic Friedel, ChessBase News, January 05, 2020

Oral History

• Oral History of Kenneth Thompson, March 7, 2005 Video © 2005 The Computer History Museum, as pdf
• Highlights Kenneth Thompson Oral History, March 7, 2005 Video © 2005 The Computer History Museum

Videos

• VCF East 2019 - Brian Kernighan interviews Ken Thompson, May 4, 2019, YouTube Video

some talk about chess starts at about 46:35

References

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