David Levy (chess player)

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David Neil Lawrence Levy (b. March 14, 1945, in London), is a Scottish International Master chess player and businessman, noted for his involvement with computer chess, the Computer Olympiads (founder), and the Mind Sports Olympiads (founder). He has written more than 40 books on chess and computers. In 1972, at the Skopje Chess Olympiad, he played Board 1 for the Scottish team. David won the Scottish Chess Championship in 1968.

In 1968 he started a landmark wager with four Artificial Intelligence (AI) luminaries that no computer program would win a chess match against him within 10 years. In 1978 he won that bet by defeating the Northwestern University computer program Chess 4.7 in a six-game match. These events led to a prize of $5,000 offered by Omni magazine to the authors of the first chess program to defeat Levy. Levy was defeated in 1989 by Deep Thought. In 1996, Popular Science asked Levy about Garry Kasparov's impending match against Deep Blue. Levy confidently stated that "...Kasparov can take the match 6 to 0 if he wants to. 'I'm positive, I'd stake my life on it.'"^[1]

Levy married the sister of English Grandmaster Raymond Keene.

He has functioned as literary agent for the escaped Great Train robber, Ronald Biggs.

In 1997 he led the team that won the Loebner Prize for the program called "CONVERSE".

Since 1999 he has been the president of the International Computer Games Association.

He once started a business called Tiger Computer Security with a famous computer hacker Mathew Bevan.

He was Chairman of the Rules and Arbitration Committee for the Kasparov vs Deep Junior chess match in New York, 2003.

He is currently the CEO of Intelligent Toys Ltd, a London-based company that develops toys that incorporate AI.

Levy also wrote Love and Sex With Robots, published in the United States in 2007 by HarperCollins, and forthcoming from Duckworth in the UK. It is the commercial edition of his Ph.D. thesis, which he defended successfully on October 11, 2007, at Maastricht University, The Netherlands. On January 17th, 2008, he appeared on the late night television show The Colbert Report to advertise his book.

1 Books
2 Further reading
3 External links
4 Notes

[edit] Books

Computer Gamesmanship: Elements of Intelligent Game Design, by David Levy, 1983, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-671-49532-1.

[edit] Further reading

Levy, David Robots Unlimited: Life in a Virtual Age London: 2005 A.K. Peters (ISBN 1568812396)
Levy, David Love and Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships New York:2007 Harper Collins (ISBN 0061359750)
A critique of Love and Sex With Robots, by James Trimarco