Robert Morgan Hyatt (born 1948) is an American computer scientist and

programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles Software development, ''software developer'' and Software engineering, ''software engineer' ...

. He co-authored the

computer chess Computer chess includes both hardware (dedicated computers) and software capable of playing chess. Computer chess provides opportunities for players to practice even in the absence of human opponents, and also provides opportunities for analysi ...

programs

Crafty Crafty is a chess program written by UAB professor Robert Hyatt, with development and assistance from Michael Byrne, Tracy Riegle, and Peter Skinner. It is derived from Cray Blitz, winner of the 1983 and 1986 World Computer Chess Championshi ...

and

Cray Blitz Cray Blitz was a computer chess program written by Robert Hyatt, Harry L. Nelson, and Albert Gower to run on the Cray supercomputer. It was derived from "Blitz" a program that Hyatt started to work on as an undergraduate. "Blitz" played its first ...

which won two

World Computer Chess Championships World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) was an event held periodically from 1974 to 2024 where computer chess engines compete against each other. The event is organized by the ''International Computer Games Association'' (ICGA, until 2002 ICCA). I ...

in the 1980s. Hyatt was a computer science professor at the

University of Southern Mississippi The University of Southern Mississippi (Southern Miss or USM) is a Public university, public research university with its main campus in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. It is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to award bac ...

(1970–1985) and

University of Alabama at Birmingham The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is a public research university in Birmingham, Alabama, United States. Founded in 1969 and part of the University of Alabama System, UAB has grown to be the state's largest employer, with more than ...

(1988–2016).

Early life and education

Hyatt was born in

Laurel, Mississippi Laurel is a city in and the second county seat of Jones County, Mississippi, United States. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 17,161. Laurel is northeast of Ellisville, the first county seat, which contains the first county ...

in 1948. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1970 and an M.S. in 1983, both from the

. His master's dissertation was titled ''Cray Blitz: A Computer Chess Playing Program''. Hyatt earned a Ph.D. in computer and information sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1988. His thesis was titled ''A High-Performance Parallel Algorithm to Search Depth-First Game Trees''. Bruce Wilsey Suter was Hyatt's doctoral advisor.

Career

Hyatt is co-author of the

program

and the co-author of

, a two-time winner of the

. He has been actively involved in computer chess since he first started to program a computer to play chess in 1968. These efforts have been supported by various computer vendors such as

Univac UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company and ...

(1978),

Cray Research Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed i ...

(1980–1994), and more recently

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

via their developer's lab. Crafty is freely available both in executable form (from many different web sites) and in source form (from Hyatt's home page). Crafty presently participates in many computer chess tournaments (and an occasional human chess tournament). An old version of the source of Cray Blitz is also available on the internet for those interested in seeing what computer chess looked like in the late 1980s. Hyatt taught computer science for 46 years, from 1970 through 1985 at the

and from 1985 through 2016 at the

. He retired in 2016 as an associate professor of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences (1988–2016).

References

External links

*
Robert Hyatt's home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hyatt, Robert American computer scientists Computer chess people University of Southern Mississippi alumni University of Alabama at Birmingham alumni University of Alabama at Birmingham faculty Living people People from Laurel, Mississippi University of Southern Mississippi faculty American computer programmers 20th-century American scientists 21st-century American scientists 1948 births