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Interview with Tom Truscott: on the Environment and Early Days Of Winter/Spring 1998 Usenet, The Unsung Hero of the Internet Volume 8 No 1 “A large part of the success of Usenet is due to the fact that its admins. do *not* generally quash argument and unpopular opinion. This made it a crucible for testing ideas and opinions in one of the closest approaches to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ that has been seen in history.” Gregory G. Woodbury Interview with Tom Truscott: Ronda: How did you become interested in computer chess? You have said it wasn’t that you were inter- On the Environment ested in chess itself. and Early Days of Usenet News by Ronda Hauben Tom: Well, I’m not sure. Here is rambling specula- [email protected] tion. As a kid I did not read much, but some things caught my imagination. One was a short story, Danny [Editor’s Note: Following is an edited interview by Dunn and the Homework Machine. (I think Danny Ronda Hauben with Tom Truscott, one of the pioneers Dunn was a kid who invented all kinds of fun stuff.) who created Usenet. It is based on an e-mail exchange.] I thought that this would be a neat machine to have. I realize it is a big leap from homework to chess Ronda: First can you say a little about your back- playing, but somehow it makes sense to me…. ground and interests in computer science before you My first chance to use a computer (an interactive became involved in Usenet? BASIC system) was in a summer program between junior and senior years of high school. My first large Tom: As an undergraduate I got interested in writing a program played checkers. It didn’t play all that well, computer chess program. I don’t play chess well but my but it seemed to have potential. As a Duke freshman chemistry lab partner did and so we undertook a my chemistry lab partner was Bruce Wright, an multi-year project to write a chess program that could excellent chess player. beat Bobby Fisher (my goal) or at least be able to beat I told him we could write a computer chess a rank amateur (partner Bruce Wright’s goal). program that would beat Bobby Fisher. He didn’t think so, but we started writing the program anyway. I was interested because of the Table of Contents computing challenge and no doubt the fame that we would garner by defeating Fisher, and I guess Bruce Interview with Tom Truscott ..............Page 1 was interested because he wanted to learn comput- Editorial ..............................Page 8 ing. We spent a LOT of time writing it, and we Factsheet Five: ACN ....................Page 9 learned a lot about how not to write programs. Cooperative Nature of Usenet .............Page 9 I guess one thing about computer game pro- Creating Broadsides ....................Page 10 grams is that they are like robots S a somewhat History of the Net is Important ...........Page 14 autonomous thing. Netizens: Review of Reviews .............Page 20 At tournaments the program tells me what Book Reviews: Netizens ................Page 22 moves to make for it, asks me how much time it has Community in k12.chat.teacher ...........Page 23 left on the clock, stuff like that. And writing a soft- Wiener and Licklider ...................Page 31 ware robot is a lot easier than building a real one. Amateur Computerist Index: 1988-1998 ....Page 35 Why I (and other people) find robots fascinating is Page 1 beyond me, but there it is. of computing then. The next oldest paper I found was from 1957 by someone who implemented a program Ronda: I have read some articles from the 1970s that similar to Shannon’s proposal. It played terribly. describe how computer chess was understood as Our first computer chess tournament was the something important. Did you have that sense? North American Computer Chess Championships, (CCC) held in November 1974 at the ACM Annual Tom: Yes, and we had the incentive to believe that Conference in San Diego. (We competed in a local because computer chess was far too expensive to be a human tournament earlier that year.) Because ACM mere hobby. From a computational point of view, chess was sponsoring it I decided to become an ACM and checkers are remarkably similar problems. And the member (in April 1974, I was a junior by then) if world’s best checkers player is still a human. But just only to see the announcements about the upcoming try asking Columbia (i.e. some university –Ed.) for tournament. It was tough reading for an undergradu- plane tickets to a computer checkers tournament, or ate but there were some interesting papers. A particu- asking the Association of Computing Machinery larly interesting one appeared that year, about a time (ACM) to spend thousands of dollars to host one! sharing system that ran on a PDP-11.2 It sounded so But enough of this cynicism. much more sensible than the IBM MVT/TSO com- When computer chess, and more generally Artifi- puter system that we were using. Simple things were cial Intelligence (AI), were just starting out, no one simple, and yet one could do nifty things as well. knew what was going to happen. Computer games were (and are) like the drosophila fruit fly of AI because the Ronda: What was the Duke computer you wrote problems are relatively simple, the rules are clear, there your first chess program for? are plenty of human experts for comparison, and there are objective measures of “success.” Many felt that Tom: It was an IBM System 370 Model 165, 80 breakthroughs in general AI would happen first in this nanosecond cycle time (12.5 MHZ in today’s lingo), simpler arena. three megabytes of main memory (later upgraded to People still don’t know what is going to happen. I four megabytes for a mere $100,000). Pretty much guess there haven’t been big breakthroughs, but there the top of the line at the time. We did our develop- are a number of “lessons” from computer chess that are ment in batch mode (the source code was on punched argued and/or used in the general AI context. One cards and the compiled code was stored on disk) and (controversial) lesson is that computers should not used time-sharing option (TSO) when competing in “think” by mimicking humans. Should planes fly by tournaments. flapping their wings? If nothing else, computer chess will make a signifi- Ronda: What happened at the tournament? cant dent in the human psyche when a computer deci- sively defeats the human world chess champion. Tom: Bruce Wright and I called our program It is going to happen sure as Silicon Valley makes “Duchess”. It did quite well, and it was there that I chips. And it will be like a tiny version of the moon met Ken Thompson who also had a good chess landing. It will be something of a stunt, and not really program. His machine was running a background that important, but it will have a symbolic impact that task sopping up idle CPU time by solving simple will change how people think. chess end games! (For example King and Rook vs. King). There was no chance we could do something Ronda: Can you say what you did once you and Bruce like that on our mainframe which cost 20 cents per Wright decided to write a championship chess pro- second. But on the other hand our three MIP main- gram? frame was about the fastest there was, and could compute rings around a little PDP. Tom: I discovered that Claude Shannon had written a There were twelve teams competing in the very early paper on how to construct a chess playing tournament. We were on a stage in a large room with machine.1 It was remarkably farsighted given the state seating for spectators. Each team had a computer Page 2 terminal (something like a dot-matrix printer with a Ronda: What does ‘losing on time’ in chess mean? keyboard in front and an acoustic modem on the back). And a telephone. Boy were those phone calls expensive. Tom: As is typical in human tournaments, each But the ACM was picking up the tab, and Duke was player has two hours to make their first 40 moves, giving us the computer time. and get an additional 30 minutes for each 10 moves At the 1974 tournament, we knocked off MIT’s after that. The games utilize a pair of clocks, one for “TECH-II” in the first round. They had come in second each player. Whenever it is a given player’s turn, the previous year, and we were a newcomer, so that was their clock is ticking. If they use up two hours before something of an upset. completing 40 moves, they “lose on time”. In the second round we got clobbered by the “Duchess” was intending to complete 40 moves in perennial champ, “CHESS 4.0" from Northwestern 1:40 (i.e. with 20 minutes to spare), but the program University. crashed so many times while trying to complete the In the third round we played Bell Labs’ “Belle”. (I last few moves that it ran out of time. think it was called “Tinker Belle” at one point.) I had met the author earlier, before the second round, when he Ronda: Can you describe what happened after the showed me how good his program was at solving chess tournament? How did you get to work at Bell mating problems. I wasn’t that interested in chess, but Labs in the Summer of 1979? humored him while he pulled a chess position out of a library and had the program find a mate in 5 (or some Tom: Duchess competed in every ACM CCC from such).
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