Charles Niessen

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Charles W. (Chuck) Niessen,

an American electrical engineer, computer scientist and retired researcher and associate head, Communications and Information Technology Division at Lincoln Laboratory [1] at Massachusetts Institute of Technology [2] . In the early 60s, already at MIT, Charles Niessen was member of the “the chess group” supervised by John McCarthy, along with Alan Kotok, Elwyn Berlekamp (1960), Michael Lieberman and Robert A. Wagner. They wrote the chess program for the IBM 7090 [3] [4], which later evolved to the Kotok-McCarthy-Chess Program.

Quotes

Quote from Alan Kotok’s Oral History concering the development of a chess program under John McCarthy at MIT:

So there were a total of five people. There was the initial four were, besides me, Charles Niessen, Chuck Niessen, whose these days is some sort of director over at [Lincoln Lab](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Lincoln_Laboratory). And [Mike Lieberman](Michael_A._Lieberman "Michael A. Lieberman"), who is on the faculty at [Berkeley](University_of_California,_Berkeley "University of California, Berkeley"). And [Elwyn Berlekamp](Elwyn_Berlekamp "Elwyn Berlekamp"), who is also Berkeley faculty, and fairly famous computer game theory person. Elwyn dropped out of this project at some point, and [Bob Wagner](Robert_A._Wagner "Robert A. Wagner"), another so these were all sort of East Campus [Model Railroad Club](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Model_Railroad_Club) friends - and Bob Wagner is at, I think, [University of North Carolina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Central_University) - what’s in [Raleigh-Durham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle)?