Date: Monday, 25-Nov-96 22:58:59 GMT Server: NCSA/1.3 MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/html Dr. Robert Hyatt's home page

Robert Hyatt

Associate Professor


Schedule

Available via hyatt@cis.uab.edu for questions nearly 24 hours daily, on ICC and/or chess.net (or other servers) when you see "hyatt" logged on.

Research Interests

Computer Chess (Crafty)

This research is developing the computer chess program "Crafty", which is a direct descendent of Cray Blitz, the World Computer Champion from 1983 to 1989. This program is a "freeware" package available from ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt. Crafty is based on the classic BITMAP approach to representing the chess board, but uses a unique methodology called "rotated bitmaps" to significantly improve the performance of the chess engine. This program is currently searching around 80,000 nodes per second on a P6/200 processor, and is playing on ICC and chess.net regularly. Its current ICC ratings are 2610 (bullet), 2750 (blitz) and 2533 (standard). Crafty is portable, and uses xboard/winboard as a GUI under the appropriate operating systems.

The current work is concentrated in three areas:

Parallel Architectures and Software

This research studies various parallel machine architectures and how they can best be used to improve the speed of software applications. These architectures pose different problems that must be addressed when developing parallel algorithms for them. Various types of parallel systems are being studied, including shared memory systems, distributed systems, and a distributed group of shared memory multiprocessors. Research into this last group is being supported by Cray Research in order to learn how to use multiple Cray XMP and YMP computer systems to solve a single problem. Algorithm design, debugging, and performance analysis of parallel algorithms are being studied in order to inprove the execution speed of parallel code. This research has produced "Tuple-Space", a distributed processing programming environment that greatly simplifies the programming effort required to distribute an application. This system is continually being revised as it is used in various research projects.

Education

BS, University of Southern Mississippi, 1970.
MS, University of Southern Mississippi, 1983.
Ph.D., University of Alabama at Birmingham, 1988.

Selected Publications

1. Lewis I. Patterson, Robert M. Hyatt, Richard S. Turner, Kevin D. Reilly, "Development of a Crash-Tolerant Tuple-Space", presented at the FSU/SCRI Cluster Computing Workshop, available via anonymous FTP from SCRI (SCRI hosts this workshop annually and distributes the proceedings via anonymous FTP.)

2. Robert M. Hyatt, Lewis I. Patterson, Richard S. Turner, Kevin D. Reilly, "Tuple-Space - Future Research Plans", presented at the FSU/ SCRI Cluster Computing Workshop, available via anonymous FTP from SCRI.

3. Robert M. Hyatt, Richard S. Turner, Lewis I. Patterson, Kevin D. Reilly, "Distributed Discrete Event Simulation - Design, Implementation and Use," Proceedings of SimTec '92, (159-165).

4. Robert M. Hyatt and Harry L. Nelson, "Chess and Supercomputers, details on optimizing Cray Blitz", proceedings of Supercomputing '90 in New York (354-363).

5. Robert M. Hyatt, Harry L. Nelson, Albert E. Gower, "Cray Blitz", in Computers, Chess, and Cognition , Springer-Verlag, 1990, (111-130).

6. Robert M. Hyatt, Bruce W. Suter, and Harry Nelson, "A Parallel Alpha/Beta Tree Searching Al", Parallel Computing 10 (1989) (299-308).

7. Robert M. Hyatt, "A High-Performance Parallel Algorithm to Search Depth-First Game Trees," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 1988.

8. Harry Nelson and Robert M. Hyatt, "The Cray Blitz Draw Heuristic", Journal of the International Computer Chess Association (ICCA)". vol 11, number 1, March 1988 (3-9)

9. R. Hyatt, H. Nelson, A. Gower, "Cray Blitz - 1984 Chess Champion", Telematics and Informatics (2) (4), Pergammon Press Ltd. (1986) (299-305).

10. Hyatt, R.M., Gower, A.E., Nelson, H.L., "Cray Blitz", Advances in Computer Chess 4, Pergammon Press, 1985 (89-106).