Word: shannons
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Bill Leonard's eyes snapped with anger. "It's a preposterous piece," he complained, "preposterous." Leonard, senior vice president of CBS News, then sat silent in his makeshift Miami Beach office, loathing William Shannon's New York Times column one more time...
...Shannon's article was the talk, the grumble of the networkers at the Republican Convention. Shannon had flung a custard pie at the screen: "On CBS the ordinary viewer trying to watch a political convention sees so much of the anchor man and his star reporters that the program might well be called Walter Cronkite and His Friends...Likewise, the NBC coverage might be better known as the David Brinkley Show...I think the time has come to ban the media mob from the floor...Then the viewers could enjoy the game-excuse me, the convention...
...executives acted like high priests struck at the altar. William Sheehan, Leonard's opposite number at ABC, found the Shannon piece "terribly wrongheaded." Richard Wald, executive vice president of NBC News, said, "I'd like to see the New York Times cover the podium and nothing else." Douglas Kiker, an NBC floor man, generously included William Shannon as "one of my respected friends. And the piece is fulla crap. Absolutely fulla crap...
...idea of programming computers to play chess is as old as the machines themselves, and dates back to 1864 when Charles Babbage speculated on how his analytic engines could be used for the game. The idea was not researched thoroughly until 1950 by an American, Claude Shannon (although several decades earlier a machine created a great sensation by beating many excellent players, until it was discovered that the device contained a chess-playing midget inside...
...Shannon's paper outlined the basic problems involved in programming a computer to play chess, and his work has served as a guide for all subsequent efforts in this field. There are two essential components to a chess program: a "tree-generating" device, and an evaluation function. The tree-generating device determines all combinations of legal moves to a fixed depth. For example, it has been estimated that in any given position, there are approximately 35 legal moves available to the player whose turn it is to move. Thus, if a program were to do a tree-search...