Levy, David N.L. 1945- (David Neil Laurence Levy)

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Levy, David N.L. 1945- (David Neil Laurence Levy)

PERSONAL:

Born March 14, 1945, in London, England; son of Alfred (a taxi driver) and Alice (a travel executive) Levy; married Jacqueline Susan Keene (a professor of history), December 7, 1973; children: Alastair Joseph, Katherine Penelope. Education: University of St. Andrews, B.Sc., 1967. Politics: Conservative. Religion: Atheist.

ADDRESSES:

Home—London, England.

CAREER:

Computer chess and artificial intelligence expert and author. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, computer programming assistant, 1967-71; professional chess player and writer, 1971-78, consultant on 1978—. Chairman of Philidor Press, Ltd., and Intelligent Chess Software, Ltd. International chess master and international chess arbiter of the International Chess Federation.

MEMBER:

International Computer Games Association (president).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Loebner Prize.

WRITINGS:

(With Raymond D. Keene) Siegen Chess Olympiad, Chess Player (Nottingham, England), 1970.

Match of the Century, Chess Player (Nottingham, England), 1970.

The Chess of Gilgoric: Svetozar Gilgoric's Chess Career, 1945-1970, World Publishing (Cleveland, OH), 1970, published in England as Svetozar Gilgoric's Chess Career, 1945-1970, Collins (London, England), 1972.

The Sicilian Dragon, Batsford (London, England), 1972, 2nd edition, 1976.

(With Raymond D. Keene) Chess Olympiad, 1972, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1973, published in England as Chess Olympiad, Skopje, 1972, Batsford (London, England), 1973.

(Annotated with Bent Larsen) San Antonio 72: Church's Fried Chicken, Inc., First International Chess Tournament, RHM Chess, 1973.

(With Stewart Reuben) The Chess Scene, Faber (London, England), 1974.

Sacrifices in the Sicilian, McKay (New York, NY), 1974.

(With Raymond D. Keene) How to Play the Opening in Chess, Collins (London, England), 1974, 2nd edition, Batsford (London, England), 1980.

How Fischer Plays Chess, Collins (London, England), 1975.

Howard Staunton, Chess Player (Nottingham, England), 1975.

The Sicilian Accelerated Dragons, Batsford (London, England), 1975.

(With Raymond D. Keene) Chess Olympiad, Nica, 1974: World Team Championship, Batsford (London, England), 1975.

(Editor) Karpov's Collected Games: All 530 Available Encounters, Hale (London, England), 1975.

(With Jean E. Hayes) The World Computer Chess Championship, Stockholm, 1974, University of Edinburgh Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1976.

Chess and Computers, Computer Science Press (Woodland Hills, CA), 1976.

(With Raymond D. Keene) An Opening Repertoire for the Attacking Club Player, Batsford (London, England), 1976, Mason/Charter (New York, NY), 1977.

1975 U.S. Computer Chess Championships, Computer Science Press (Woodland Hills, CA), 1976.

(With Kevin J. O'Connell and James B. Adams) The Complete Games of World Champion Anatoly Karpov, Batsford (London, England), 1976.

(Editor) The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal, RHM Chess, 1976.

(Editor) Wijk aan Zee Grandmaster Chess Tournament, 1975, RHM Chess, 1976.

1976 U.S. Computer Championship: Seventh U.S. Computer Chess Championship, Computer Science Press (Woodland Hills, CA), 1977.

(With Raymond D. Keene) Haifa Chess Olympiad, 1976, Chess Player (Nottingham, England), 1977.

1 b4 Sokolsky Opening, Chess Player (Nottingham, England), 1977.

Benko Counter-Gambit, Batsford (London, England), 1978.

(With Kevin J. O'Connell) How to Play the Sicilian Defense, Batsford (London, England), 1978.

(Editor, with Kevin J. O'Connell) Karpov's Games as World Champion, 1975-1978, Batsford (London, England), 1978.

(Editor) Learn Chess from the World Champions, Pergamon (New York, NY), 1979.

(With Monroe M. Newborn) More Chess and Computers: The Microcomputer Revolution, the Challenge Match, Computer Science Press (Woodland Hills, CA), 1980.

(With Kevin J. O'Connell) How to Play the King's Indian Defense, Batsford (London, England), 1980.

The King's Indian, Imprint Capablanca, 1981.

Sicilian Dragon: Classical and Levenfish Variations, Batsford (London, England), 1981.

(Editor, with Kevin J. O'Connell) The Oxford Encyclopedia of Chess Games, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1981.

(With Monroe M. Newborn) All about Chess and Computers, Computer Science Press (Woodland Hills, CA), 1982.

Computer Gamesmanship, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1983.

(With Kevin J. O'Connell) Instant Chess, Pergamon (New York, NY), 1984.

The Joy of Computer Chess, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1984, published in England as The Chess Computer Handbook, Batsford (London, England), 1984.

(Editor) Computer Games, Springer-Verlag (New York, NY), 1988.

(Editor, with D.F. Beal) Heuristic Programming in Artificial Intelligence: The First Computer Olympiad, Halstead (New York, NY), 1989.

(With Raymond D. Keene) An Opening Repertoire for the Attacking Player, H. Holt (New York, NY), 1994.

Robots Unlimited: Life in a Virtual Age, A.K. Peters (Wellesley, MA), 2006.

Love + Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relations, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to magazines and newspapers.

SIDELIGHTS:

David N.L. Levy is an internationally recognized authority on artificial intelligence and a self-taught expert on computer chess. He has written and edited numerous books about chess and is the author of the 2007 book Love + Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relations. In the book, considered controversial by many critics, Levy sets out to persuade the reader that within the next few decades many people will be falling in love with, having sex with, and even marrying robots. He bases his argument on extensive research on robotics, psychology, sexology, human-computer interaction, and other related subjects.

Critics' reviews about Love + Sex with Robots were mixed. "Levy spends so much time laying out his logical arguments about how and why we will fall in love with robots that he gives short shrift to the bigger questions of whether we would really want to. I'd have liked a little less gee-whiz, and a little more examination about whether a sexbot in every home, a Kama Sutra on legs that never tires, never says no, and never has needs of its own is what we really want," remarked New York Times Book Review critic Robin Marantz Henig. "It's no mean feat just presenting a prediction as outlandish as that as unabashedly as Levy does. But more impressive still is how coherently he backs it up. Levy's expertise in artificial intelligence and related fields goes back many years, but to make this case he had to wander far afield, into areas of research that clearly lay beyond his intellectual comfort zone but ultimately yielded the support he needed," observed Julian Dibbell in a review of the book for the London Telegraph. "Unfortunately, too much of this book is devoted to Levy's amateur psychoanalysis of interpersonal and sexual relationships," stated Time Out Chicago contributor Jonathan Messinger. A Kirkus Reviews critic noted that "Levy is willing to go far out on a limb with his predictions, and even the reader who remains unconvinced may well enjoy this thought-provoking and entertaining ride into the future."

Levy once told CA: "In 1968, I started a famous bet that no computer program would win a chess match against me within ten years. I played the final match at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto in August 1978, and won."