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∂AIL Professor M. M. Newborn↓School of Computer Science
↓McGill University↓Montreal, Quebec H3A 2K6↓CANADA∞

Dear Monte:

	Thanks for your letter of September 12.  I am sure you are
right that imposing printout requirements would be an inconvenience
to many chess programmers and would exclude many of the micro-processor
programs.  It's just that ACM as a scientific organization should
be prepared to make contestants in its tournaments (as opposed to
those organized by %2Popular Electronics%1) provide information
that will allow scientific study and get away from the anthropomorphism
encouraged in the public by the present practice.

	Thanks for the papers.  Incidentally, I am also responsible for
the killer heuristic including the name.  It was first used by Paul
Abrahams (now at the Courant Institute)
 about 1958 in a two-move mate program for the IBM 704 that
he wrote under my direction.  As I recall, it reduced the time required
to solve the "average problem" from about seven minutes to two minutes.
A student named Richard Russell
added narrow alpha-beta windowing to a kalah program at Stanford
around 1965, and it produced a great reduction in search time.
Barbara Huberman is now Barbara Liskov, a professor at M.I.T., but
she hasn't done anything with chess recently.

.reg