Joe Hoane on his early programming experiences:
"There was a Radio Shack TRS80 in my library in my high
school. And you could sit down and write some basic programs on it. I
remember looking at the instructions and figuring out how to make the cursor
bounce around the screen like in "Pong"... I think that's the first program I
ever wrote."
As the software engineer of the Deep Blue project, Joe Hoane is in charge of
developing the algorithms behind the computer's incredible search capacity.
When Deep Blue's search speed is increased, the computer is able to search
more positions. This, in turn, improves Deep Blue's ability to play chess.
"You do the search better because you do the search software better," says
Hoane. "And so, you play chess better because it's effectively faster."
A natural for the project
A. Joseph Hoane, Jr. joined the Deep Blue development team in November 1990.
His primary focus at the time was the parallel search algorithm, a pursuit
that became an integral part of Deep Blue's improvement as a chess player.
Hoane was a natural to work on Deep Blue's parallel processing software;
before being recruited for the project his previous efforts at IBM Research
included work on RP3, a research parallel processor, and network simulation
for parallel processors to understand the communications overhead. He had
also designed a custom enabled compiler for a database system.
Urbana, Illinois
Hoane attended the University of Illinois, Urbana, graduating with a B.S. in
Computer Science in 1984. He received an M.S. in Computer Science from
Columbia University in New York in 1994.
With the 30-year anniversary of the movie 2001 approaching, Hoane was
recently invited back to his alma mater to talk about the Deep Blue project.
As those familiar with the movie will remember, 2001's anthropomorphic
computer, HAL, was supposedly born in Urbana, Illinois in 1997. It was also
an accomplished chess player.
Urbana held a "birthday" celebration to commemorate the event, and Hoane was
among the guest speakers at the event. "I was thinking about HAL (when I was)
going back to Illinois," he said, "Because HAL as a chess player is a human
chess player, ok? He's intelligent. Would Deep Blue beat HAL? Probably. It's
certainly plausible to think that it would - at chess I mean."
Day-to-day
Hoane's day-to-day activities include a little bit of everything. Besides his
efforts to increase the speed and capacity of Deep Blue's search mechanism,
Hoane assists in the design of Deep Blue's architecture and the effort to
maximize the power of the
IBM SP (Deep Blue's model).
Although Deep Blue is a powerful machine, Hoane sees the computer more as an
extension of human capabilities. He feels that Deep Blue allows us to solve
problems in ways that we, as humans, never thought possible.
A chess novice
As a chess player, Hoane is still "less than expert." How would he fare
against Deep Blue? "I don't have to play Deep Blue to lose badly to a
computer," he says.
"But that just shows you what you can do with a computer. I'm vicariously
playing chess at a World Championship level, but I'm no more than an expert
chess player. If I'm the one programming the computer, and the computer can
play at that level, then that shows you what you can do with a computer."
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