Professor Monroe (Monty) Newborn

Chairman and principal organizer (along with Ben Mittman) of the Computer Chess Committee for the Association of Computing Machines, he was a Professor of Electrical Engineering in Columbia University, and is now a Professor of Computer Science at McGill University in Montreal. He co-authored a computer chess program named Ostrich, which competed in five world championships through the 1970s and 1980s, nearly winning in 1974. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from The Ohio State University in 1967. He was an Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at Columbia University in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 1967 to 1975. In 1975, he joined the School of Computer Science at McGill University and has been with the School since then, serving as its Director from 1976 to 1983. He served as President of the International Computer Chess Association from 1983 to 1986. He served as chairman of the ACM Computer Chess Committee from 1981 until 1997. In that capacity he organized the first Kasparov versus Deep Blue match (known as the ACM Chess Challenge) in 1996. The following year he served as head of the officials at the second Kasparov versus Deep Blue match won by Deep Blue. Octopus and Theo, two automated theorem-proving programs developed over the last fifteen years are the current focus of his work. They both competed in the 2006 World Championship for ATP Systems in Seattle, Washington. Octopus, a multiprocessor version of Theo, ran on 133 PCs in the School's laboratories during the competition, searching in parallel for proofs of theorems chosen by the competition's organizers. In the 2004 competition, Octopus performed admirably, solving more theorems among those that no entry had seen before than any other entry. Octopus and Theo finished best of the North American entries. He is the author or co-author of several books, including: Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence Milestone, Springer-Verlag, 200; Automated Theorem Proving: Theory and Practice, Springer-Verlag, 2001; Deep Blue: Computer Chess Comes of Age, Springer-Verlag, 1997; How Computers Play Chess, with D. Levy, WH. Freeman, NY, 1991; All About Chess and Computers, with D. Levy, Computer Sci Press, Potomac, MD, 1982; More Chess and Computers, with D. Levy, Computer Sci Press, Potomac, MD, 1980; and Computer Chess, Academic Press, NY, 1975. He has also published a number of research papers.