Louis Victor Allis (born 19 May 1965) is a Dutch

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and co-founder of the election information technology firm Activote. In his graduate work, he revealed AI solutions for Connect Four, Qubic, and

Gomoku ''Gomoku'', also called ''five in a row'', is an Abstract strategy game, abstract strategy board game. It is traditionally played with Go (game), Go pieces (black and white stones) on a 15×15 Go board while in the past a 19×19 board was standa ...

. His dissertation introduced two new game search techniques: proof-number search and dependency-based search. Proof-number search has seen further successful application in computer Go tactical search and many other games.

Career

Allis holds a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from

Maastricht University Maastricht University (abbreviated as UM; ) is a public university, public research university in Maastricht, Netherlands. Founded in 1976, it is the second youngest of the thirteen List of universities in the Netherlands, Dutch universities. In ...

, The Netherlands, and graduated ''cum laude'' with a M. Sc. in Computer Science from the Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands. He has more than 30 publications to his name; the majority of his published work reports on research in search technologies. He started his career in 1987 as a freelance teacher, course developer and mentor of various AMBI courses for NOVI. Allis has lectured at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam as an assistant professor in artificial intelligence. In 1992, his program Victoria won the 4th Computer Olympiad in the game of

without losing a single game. His programs had also won first places at the Computer Olympiad in games of Connect Four (1989), Awari (1990, 1991, 1992), and Qubic (1991), thus making him winner of all four early Computer Olympiads. He co-authored a solution of 4×4×4 Qubic game using his proof-number search technique. In 1995 he joined Bolesian (a knowledge technology firm in the Netherlands which is a daughter company of Capgemini and specialized in developing advanced systems based on artificial intelligence) as a senior consultant and manager. In 1997 he co-founded Quintiq and was appointed as the company's CEO. Allis relocated to the

Philadelphia Philadelphia ( ), colloquially referred to as Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the List of United States cities by population, sixth-most populous city in the Unit ...

office Quintiq in 2010, remaining CEO and a co-owner. Quintiq was acquired by Dassault Systemes in July 2014. In 2019, Allis and Sara Gifford co-founded Activote, a Boston-based election information technology company.

Notes

External links

Allis's home page
(archived)
Quintiq company siteVictor Allis
at Chess Programming Wiki.
Activote
1965 births Living people Dutch computer scientists Dutch technology chief executives Artificial intelligence researchers Go (game) researchers People from Gemert-Bakel Maastricht University alumni Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam alumni {{compu-scientist-stub