David Fotland

Email address: fotland@smart-games.com
Residence: 4863 Capistrano Ave. San Jose
State: CA 95129-1031
Country: USA
Phone: (408)985-1236
Birthday: September 25, 1957

My Family:

I was born, and grew up in the east side suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. I have 2 younger sisters, and two much younger half-sisters.

I met Wendy Rubin on May 31, 1975, at a high school graduation party, and we were married on May 15, 1982.

We have two sons, Jonathan (born March 6, 1990), and Alexander (born October 25, 1992).

My Education:

I went to Hawken school from 3rd grade through high school on a scholarship. I won a 4 year, full tuition scholarship to Case Western Reserve University and received a BS Electrical Engineering in May, 1979, and a MS in Computer Engineering in August, 1979. I wanted the masters degree, but the scholarship was only for four years, and my part time jobs only brought in enough money to pay room and board, so I had no choice but to finish the MS and BS in 4 years. I was (and am) very interested in both hardware design and software development. I knew I could do software on my own, as a business and hobby, and that I could never afford to do any significant hardware project on my own, so when I graduated I only looked at hardware design jobs.

My Career:

I worked for Hewlett Packard (now Hewlett Packard Enterprise) from July, 1979 to December 2000. My areas of expertise were processor instruction sets, multiprocessor cache coherency, VLSI chip design, mutiprocessor system performance analysis, system modeling in C and C++. The products I worked on at HP were mostly been servers aimed at commercial data processing, including the HP1000 A series, HP9000/840, the HP3000/930, the Emerald and T500 systems, the K class servers, and Superdome servers. I led the design of the Superdome high end server chipset. Projects I have worked on include:

• HP-1000 A series computer Instruction set architecture.
• HP-1000 A700 CPU design (First A-series processor).
• PA-RISC instruction set design. Named on two instruction set patents.
• Led the design of the first PA-RISC processor and system (HP9000-840).
• Design of the 840 system bus (later evolved to the NIO bus).
• Led investigation of PA-7200 processor, and managed PA-7200 functional verification.
• Design of the HP/Intel IA-64 (Merced) instruction set.
• Architecture of the Superdome high end server.
• Server performance modeling tools.

From late 2000 to mid 2011, I was Chief Technology officer at Ubicom (Wikipedia on Ubicom). We developed chips and software to enable the low cost devices to use the internet to connect to anything.

Since January 2012 I have been working on device software at Amazon/Lab126.

My Business

I wrote "The Many Faces of Go", one of the strongest and most popular computer go programs. My business, Smart Games, publishes The Many Faces of Go for Windows XP through Windows 10 (and later). The same engine is used in the popular Igowin iPhone apps.

My Hobbies:

• Go. I learned the rules of go when I was in college, but it was several years before I played a game with someone who had not just learned the rules himself. There was a small club at HP, so I started playing with serious players in 1979. I was 10 Kyu in about '81, 1 dan by 85, and 3 dan around 1990. My current rating from the American Go association is 3 dan. I have attended over 10 of the US Go Congress's.
• Strategy Games. I like playing Chess, Bridge, Risk, Othello, Twixt, Trax, and other strategy games.
• Computer Go. I started writing my first go program in 1981, in C, on an HP1000 E-series timesharing server at work. In 1984 it was the first program to run the new PA-RISC hardware prototypes. In 1987, I took it to the World Computer Go Championship, and came in 4th, beating all western programs. I started selling it in 1988. I organized the US Computer Go Championship at the Go Congress every year from 1991 to 2000. I've participated in most of the World Computer Go Championships. An old version of my go algorithm was one of the SpecInt benchmarks used as a standard for comparing computer performance.
• Artificial Intelligence. I've always been fascinated with making computers act intelligently. In high school I wrote a checkers program that could beat me (in BASIC on an HP2000 timeshare system). In college I wrote a multiplayer, 3-d space battle game with intelligent aliens. I dabbled with computer chess for a year or so around 1979, then started on computer go. A few years ago I wrote an english language conversation program so that the version of Many Faces on the Internet Go server could talk to other players. I've also written the world's strongest program that plays the game of domineering, an Othello program, a bridge program, and several tic-tac-toe programs. In 1997 I took 3 months off from go programming and wrote a moderate strength Chess program for a software publisher to go on a multigame CD-ROM.
• Computer Games. I like almost all types of computer games, but especially construction/simulation games like Civilization and Caesar II, War games like Command and Conquer, fighting games like Doom or Hexen, and adventure games. I play computer games on the IBM PC, in arcades, and on my Nintendo-64 (although Jonathan can beat me on most Nintendo games now).
• Genealogy. I have been adding to my family tree since I was a child, and now have over 600 names. Fotland is from the name of a small town in Norway, and I am half Norwegian. The other half is a mix of German (Bierwagen, Treibwasser), French/German (Dubbe), and English (Gould, Royce, Shields). The English branch of the family has been in the USA since before the revolution. To see a map with origins of more recent immigrant ancestors of my wife and I, Click here (109 KB).
• Reading. I like good science fiction and fantasy, historical fiction, novels that aren't too literary, and popular science books. Here is my list of favorite books and authors and my Goodreads Account.
• Travel. I speak a little French and a few words of Japanese and Chinese. I've been to Taiwan more than 10 times, Japan about 8 times, France 4 times, Mainland China 5 times, and about 25 other countries once or twice.

My Favorite Links

• Go Links:
  • The American Go Association Home Page. Rules, tournaments, etc.
  • The British Go Association Home Page. Lots of go information.
  • The Japanese Professional Go Association (Nihon Ki-in) home page.
  • Jan van der Steen's go pages. Pro games, openings, go dictionary, etc.
• Computer Go and AI links:
  • The Computer Go ladder.

Page created by: fotland@smart-games.com
Changes last made on: June 5, 2016