Tony Marsland

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Tony Marsland at the WMCCC 1985 [1] Thomas Anthony (Tony) Marsland,

a Canadian computer scientist and game researcher. He is co-creator and eponym of the Principal Variation Search. Until about 1986 he worked extensively on the selective search computer chess programs Marsland CP (aka Wita) and Awit/Wita [2] [3], written in AlgolW, and participated with it in many North American and World Computer Chess Championships [4] . Along with Fred Popowich, Tony is further co-author of the experimental parallel chess program Parabelle, and with Chun Ye co-author of the Chinese Chess program and shared gold medal winner at the 3rd Computer Olympiad, Abyss. From 1992 until 1999, Tony Marsland served as President of the ICCA. He is now Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

About Tony Marsland#

Quote from Tony Marsland’s biography [7] :

Tony Marsland received his B.Sc. in Honours Mathematics from the [University of Nottingham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Nottingham) (UK, 1958) and M.S.E(E) and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the [University of Washington](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Washington), Seattle (USA, 1967). After working one year as an assistant professor he went to [AT&T Bell Laboratories](Bell_Laboratories "Bell Laboratories") in New Jersey for two years as a research scientist, before joining the Computing Science Department at the [University of Alberta](University_of_Alberta "University of Alberta"). He was an [ACM](ACM "ACM") National Lecturer during 1979-81 and a [McCalla Research Professor](https://www.conman.ualberta.ca/stellent/groups/public/@academic/documents/procedure/pp_cmp_061816.hcsp) in 1985-86. His primary teaching and research interests were in the area of distributed computing systems design.

In the past, Tony served on a variety of General and Faculty committees, and completed one term as Associate Chair of Computing Science with primary responsibility for the Graduate Program. After helping for many years on NSERC's International Relations Committee, he spent much of the 1994 academic year visiting the [University of Hong Kong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Hong_Kong). In addition to normal teaching and research activities he was President of the International Computer Chess Association (1992-99). Separately, he has edited two books and written three lengthy encyclopedic articles in recent years.

Despite years of programming experience with languages like [Assembly](Assembly "Assembly"), [Fortran](Fortran "Fortran"), [Snobol](index.php?title=Snobol&action=edit&redlink=1 "Snobol (page does not exist)"), [Lisp](index.php?title=Lisp&action=edit&redlink=1 "Lisp (page does not exist)"), [Pascal](Pascal "Pascal") and [C](C "C") (and the many arcane scripting languages on [Unix](Unix "Unix") Systems), he is now happy to let others do the real work while he enjoys modern computer interfaces for day to day use and communication!

After many years as a Professional Engineer (member of APEGGA) he has a continuing special interest in the Industrial Internship Program (IIP) (which he directed 1994-2002) and in maintaining good external contacts. 

Selected Publications#

[8] [9] [10] [11]

1965 …#

• Tony Marsland (1965). Control Systems Study through Dynamic and Non-linear Programming. M.S.E.(E). Thesis, University of Washington
• Tony Marsland (1967). Adaptive Computer Programs: An Aid in Problem Analysis. Ph.D. thesis, University of Washington
• Tony Marsland (1967). An Adaptive Computing System for the Synthesis of Threshold Logic Networks. Air Force Report for Contract AFOSR-468-65
• Tony Marsland, David L. Johnson (1968). The Evolution of Threshold Logic Networks which recognize Binary Patterns. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, pdf

1970 …#

• Paul Rushton, Tony Marsland (1973). Current Chess Programs: A Summary of their Potential and Limitations. INFOR Journal of the Canadian Information Processing Society Vol. 11, No. 1, pdf
• Tony Marsland, Paul Rushton (1973). Mechanisms for Comparing Chess Programs. ACM Annual Conference, pdf
• Tony Marsland, Paul Rushton (1973). A Study of Techniques for Game-Playing Programs. Journal of Computer Science, Vol. 4, No. 2, pdf
• Tony Marsland, Paul Rushton (1974). A Study of Techniques for Game-Playing Programs. Advances in Cybernetics and Systems (ed. J. Rose), Vol. 1, pp. 363-371. Gordon & Breach, pdf
• Tony Marsland (1974). A users guide to WITA, a chess program. Technical report, University of Alberta

1975 …#

• Tony Marsland (1976). 1976 Canadian Computer Chess Workshop. Firbush News, Univ. of Edinburgh, pp 37-40. pdf
• Tony Marsland (1979). A bibliography of computer chess. Machine Intelligence 9 (eds. Jean Hayes Michie, Donald Michie and L.I. Mikulich), pp. 373-384. Ellis Horwood, Chichester. pdf

1980 …#

• Tony Marsland, Murray Campbell, A. L. Rivera (1980). Parallel Search of Game Trees. Technical Report TR 80-7, Computing Science Department, University of Alberta, pdf
• Tony Marsland, Monty Newborn (1981). A brighter future for Soviet computer chess? ICCA Newsletter, Vol. 4, No. 1, pdf
• Tony Marsland, Steve Sutphen (1980). A Heterogeneous Dual Processor. Software Practice and Experience, Vol. 10, No. 1
• Ben Mittman, Tony Marsland, Monroe Newborn, Kathe Spracklen, Ken Thompson (1981). Computer chess: Master level play in 1981? ACM 81: Proceedings of the ACM ‘81 conference
• Tony Marsland, Murray Campbell (1981). A Survey of Enhancements to the Alpha-Beta Algorithm. Proceedings of the ACM'81, pp. 109-114. Los Angeles.
• Tony Marsland, Murray Campbell (1981). Parallel Search of Strongly Ordered Game Trees. Technical Report TR 81-9, Department of Computing Science , University of Alberta, pdf
• Tony Marsland, Murray Campbell (1982). Parallel Search of Strongly Ordered Game Trees. ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 533-551. ISSN 0360-0300, pdf
• Tony Marsland, Murray Campbell (1982). A Study of Parallel Tree Search Algorithms. Technical Report TR 82-4, Computing Science Department, University of Alberta, pdf
• Tony Marsland (1982). A Quantitative Study of Refinements to the Alpha-Beta Algorithm. Technical Report TR82-6. Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, pdf
• Tony Marsland (1982). Relative Performance of the Alpha-Beta Algorithm. ICCA Newsletter, Vol. 5, No. 2
• Tony Marsland (1983). Relative Efficiency of Alpha-beta Implementations. IJCAI 1983, pdf
• Tony Marsland (1983). Peter W. Frey (Editor): Chess Skill in Man and Machine (2nd ed.). ICCA Journal, Vol. 6, No. 4
• Murray Campbell, Tony Marsland (1983). A Comparison of Minimax Tree Search Algorithms. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 347-367. ISSN 0004-3702, pdf
• Tony Marsland, Fred Popowich (1983). A Multiprocessor Tree-searching System Design. Technical Report TR 83-6, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta
• Fred Popowich, Tony Marsland. (1983) Parabelle: Experience with a Parallel Chess Program. Technical Report 83-7. Computing Science Department, University of Alberta
• Tony Marsland (1984). ACM’s Fifteenth North American Computer Chess Championship (NACCC). ICCA Journal, Vol. 7, No. 4

1985 …#

• Tony Marsland (1985). Evaluation-Function Factors. ICCA Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2, pdf
• Alexander Reinefeld, Tony Marsland, Jonathan Schaeffer (1985). Is Best First Search Really Best? Technical Report TR 85-16, Department of Computer Science, University of Alberta.
• Tony Marsland, Fred Popowich (1985). Parallel Game-Tree Search. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 442-452. 1984 pdf (Draft)
• Alexander Reinefeld, Jonathan Schaeffer, Tony Marsland (1985). Information Acquisition in Minimal Window Search. Proceedings of the 9th IJCAI, pp. 1040-1043.
• Jonathan Schaeffer, Tony Marsland (1985). The Utility of Expert Knowledge. IJCAI 1985
• Marius Olafsson, Tony Marsland (1985). Implementation of Virtual Tree Machines. TR85-9, Computing Science Department, University of Alberta
• Marius Olafsson, Tony Marsland (1985). A UNIX Based Virtual Tree Machine. Proceedings of the 1985 CIPS/ACI Congress, Montreal, June 1985, 176-181
• Tony Marsland (1985). D.E. Welsh and B. Baczynskyj: Computer Chess II. ICCA Journal, Vol. 8, No. 3 (review) » David E. Welsh, Boris Baczynskyj
• William Ward Armstrong, Tony Marsland, Marius Olafsson, Jonathan Schaeffer (1985). Solving Equations of Motion on a Virtual Tree Machine. Second Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing
• Tony Marsland (1986). A Review of Game-Tree Pruning. ICCA Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1, pdf
• Tony Marsland, Nanda Srimani (1986). Phased State Search. Fall Joint Computer Conference, pdf
• Tony Marsland, Marius Olafsson, Jonathan Schaeffer (1986). Multiprocessor Tree-Search Experiments. Advances in Computer Chess 4
• William Ward Armstrong, Tony Marsland, Marius Olafsson, Jonathan Schaeffer, Steve Sutphen (1986). Large Grained Parallelism at the University of Alberta. In Large Grained Parallelism Workshop, 1986.
• Tony Marsland (1986). The 6th World Microcomputer-Chess Championship. ICCA Journal, Vol. 9, No. 4 » WMCCC 1986
• Tony Marsland (1987). Computer Chess Methods. Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence (ed. S. Shapiro). John Wiley & sons, New York.
• Tony Marsland (1987). Workshop Report: Theory and Practice in Computer Chess. ICCA Journal, Vol. 10, No. 4 » ACM 1987
• Liwu Li, Tony Marsland (1987). A parallel algorithm for finding a maximum flow in 0-1 networks. ACM Conference on Computer Science 1987
• Tony Marsland, Alexander Reinefeld, Jonathan Schaeffer (1987). Low Overhead Alternatives to SSS*. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 185-199. ISSN 0004-3702.
• Alexander Reinefeld, Tony Marsland (1987). A Quantitative Analysis of Minimal Window Search. IJCAI 1987, pdf
• Prakash Bettadapur, Tony Marsland (1988). Accuracy and Savings in Depth-Limited Capture Search. In International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 29 (5) pp. 497-502
• Tony Marsland (1989). Workshop Report on New Technologies for Chess. ICCA Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1, pdf » ACM 1988
• Tony Marsland (1989). A short History of Computer Chess. Kings move - Welcome to the 1989 AGT World Computer Chess Championship. pp. 6-9, pdf from The Computer History Museum, Courtesy of Peter Jennings
• Tim Breitkreutz, Steve Sutphen, Tony Marsland (1989). Developing NMP Applications. Technical Report TR89-11, Computing Science Department, University of Alberta, CiteSeerX, (Network Multiprocessor Package)
• Tony Marsland (1989). New Directions in Game-Tree Search. ICCA Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2
• Tony Marsland (1989). The Bratko-Kopec Test Revisited. Workshop on New Directions in Game-Tree Search
• Liwu Li, Tony Marsland (1989). Probability-Based Game Tree Pruning. pdf

1990 …#

• Liwu Li, Tony Marsland (1990). Probability-Based Game Tree Pruning. Journal of Algorithms, Vol. 11, No. 1
• Tony Marsland (1990). The Bratko-Kopec Test Revisited. ICCA Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1
• Tony Marsland (1990). The Bratko-Kopec Test Revisited. Computers, Chess, and Cognition
• Tony Marsland (1990). A Short History of Computer Chess. Computers, Chess, and Cognition
• Tony Marsland, Jonathan Schaeffer (eds.) (1990). Computers, Chess, and Cognition
• Liwu Li, Tony Marsland (1990). On Minimax Game Tree Search Pathology and Node-value Dependence. TR90-24, University of Alberta, pdf
• Tony Marsland, Tim Breitkreutz, Steve Sutphen (1991). A Network Multiprocessor for Experiments in Parallelism. Concurrency: Practice and Experience, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 203-219. pdf
• Robert Levinson, Feng-hsiung Hsu, Tony Marsland, Jonathan Schaeffer, David Wilkins (1991). The Role of Chess in Artificial Intelligence Research. IJCAI 1991, pdf, also in ICCA Journal, Vol. 14, No. 3, pdf
• Chun Ye, Tony Marsland (1992). Experiments in Forward Pruning with Limited Extensions. ICCA Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2
• Tony Marsland (1992). Chess and AI: Workshop Report. ICCA Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4
• Tony Marsland (1992). Computer Chess and Search. Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence (2nd ed.) John Wiley & Sons, Inc. pdf preprint [12] [13]
• Chun Ye, Tony Marsland (1992). Selective Extensions in Game-Tree Search. Heuristic Programming in AI 3, pdf
• Tony Marsland (1992). Game-Tree and Single-Agent Search. Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, Vol 27, No. 12
• Zhonghua Yang, Tony Marsland (1992). Global Snapshots for Distributed Debugging. ICCI 1992
• Zhonghua Yang, Tony Marsland (1993). Distributed Debugging in the Large. pdf
• Zhonghua Yang, Tony Marsland (1993). Global States and Time in Distributed Systems. IEEE Computer Society Press
• Alexander Reinefeld, Tony Marsland (1994). Enhanced Iterative-Deepening Search. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 16, No. 7, pdf

1995 …#

• Tony Marsland, Yaoqing Gao (1995). Speculative Parallelism Improves Search? Technical Report 95-05, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, CiteSeerX
• Tony Marsland (1995). The Anatomy of Chess Programs. 8th World Computer Chess Championship pp. 4-6, pdf from The Computer History Museum, Courtesy of Monroe Newborn
• Tony Marsland (1996). The ACM Chess Challenge. pdf from the The Computer History Museum, Courtesy of ACM » Kasparov versus Deep Blue 1996
• Tony Marsland (1996). The Future of Computer Chess. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1
• Yaoqing Gao, Tony Marsland (1996). Multithreaded Pruned Tree Search in Distributed Systems. Journal of Computing and Information, 2(1), 482-492, pdf
• Tony Marsland (1996). Recognition of Local Participation. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 4
• Tony Marsland (1996). Experience is a Hard Teacher. ICCA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 4
• Tony Marsland, Yngvi Björnsson. (1997) From MiniMax to Manhattan. Deep Blue versus Kasparov, AAAI Workshop, pdf
• Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland, Jonathan Schaeffer, Andreas Junghanns (1997). Searching with Uncertainty Cut-offs. ICCA Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1, pdf preprint
• Tony Marsland (1997). A Report on the Fredkin Prize for Computer Chess. ICCA Journal, Vol. 20, No. 3 » Fredkin Prize
• Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland, Jonathan Schaeffer, Andreas Junghanns (1997). Searching with Uncertainty Cut-offs. Advances in Computer Chess 8
• Andreas Junghanns, Jonathan Schaeffer, Mark Brockington, Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (1997). Diminishing Returns for Additional Search in Chess. Advances in Computer Chess 8, pdf
• Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (1998). Risk Management in Game-tree Pruning. Technical Report TR 98-07, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta
• Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (1998). Multi-cut Pruning in Alpha-Beta Search. CG 1998, see MC2001 for an expanded version

2000 …#

• Tony Marsland, Ian Frank (eds.) (2000). Computers and Games. CG 2000
• Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (2000). Risk Management in Game-tree Pruning. Information Sciences, 122(1):23–41, 2000. pdf
• Tony Marsland, Yngvi Björnsson (2000). From Minimax to Manhattan. in Jaap van den Herik, Hiroyuki Iida (eds.) (2000). Games in AI Research. Universiteit Maastricht
• Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (2000). Selective Depth-First Search Methods. in Jaap van den Herik, Hiroyuki Iida (eds.) (2000). Games in AI Research. Universiteit Maastricht, pdf preprint
• Tony Marsland, Yngvi Björnsson (2001). Variable Depth Search. Advances in Computer Games 9, pp. 9-24. pdf
• Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (2001). Learning Search Control in Adversary Games. Advances in Computer Games 9, pp. 157-174. pdf
• Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (2001). Multi-cut Alpha-Beta Pruning in Game Tree Search. Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. 252, pp. 177-196. pdf
• Yngvi Björnsson, Tony Marsland (2002). Learning Control of Search Extensions. Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Information Sciences (JCIS 2002), pp. 446-449. pdf
• Dave Gomboc, Tony Marsland, Michael Buro (2003). Evaluation Function Tuning via Ordinal Correlation. Advances in Computer Games 10, pdf
• Danny Kopec, Daniel Cox, Tony Marsland (2004). Chapter 63: Search, in The Computer Science and Engineering Handbook, 2nd Edition, Allen B. Tucker (editor), CRC Press, 2004, 63-1 to 63-26. pdf (Draft 2003)
• Dave Gomboc, Michael Buro, Tony Marsland (2005). Tuning Evaluation Functions by Maximizing Concordance. Theoretical Computer Science, Elsevier, 2005. pdf
• Tony Marsland (2005). Trials and Tribulations of a Programmer. Advances in Computer Games 11 - Invited Lecture

2020 …#

• Tony Marsland (2020). Computer loses in king-size blunder. ICGA Journal, Vol. 42, Nos. 2-3

Forum Posts#

• 1996 World Microcomputer Chess Championship by Tony Marsland, rgcc, May 22, 1996 » WMCCC 1996
• WORLD MICROCOMPUTER CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP 1996 by Tony Marsland, rgcc, September 12, 1996
• CW and the ICCA by Tony Marsland, rgcc, February 26, 1997 » Chris Whittington, ICCA

External Links#

• Tony Marsland’s homepage
• Tony Marsland | LinkedIn
• Tony Marsland’s ICGA Tournaments
• Marsland Anthony | The Chess Federation of Canada - La Fédération Canadienne des Échecs
• The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Thomas Marsland
• Awit-Wita Computer Chess Archive

References#

1. ↑ Image captured from the WMCCC 1985 Video @ 0:15
2. ↑ Awit-Wita Computer Chess Archive
3. ↑ Box and File Descriptions for the Records of Dr. Marsland (pdf)
4. ↑ Tony Marsland’s ICGA Tournaments
5. ↑ Chess pioneers in Sacher Hotel Vienna, Austria, Gift of Benjamin Mittman, The Computer History Museum
6. ↑ Photo by Theo van der Storm, 10e WK Computerschaak old CSVN Site
7. ↑ About Tony Marsland
8. ↑ Research Papers
9. ↑ T.A(Tony) Marsland - Selected out-of-print research papers
10. ↑ DBLP: T. Anthony Marsland
11. ↑ ICGA Reference Database
12. ↑ Excellent Computer-Chess Overview Paper Found! by Ernst A. Heinz, rgcc, March 6, 1997
13. ↑ Great article for people who wants to write a chess engine by Miguel A. Ballicora, CCC, April 03, 2002

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