Thomas Anantharaman

Thomas S. Anantharaman is a computer statistician specializing in Bayesian inference approaches for NP-complete problems. He is best known for his work with Feng-hsiung Hsu from 1985 to 1990 on the Chess playing computers ChipTest and Deep Thought at Carnegie Mellon University which led to his 1990 PhD Dissertation: "A Statistical Study of Selective Min-Max Search in Computer Chess". This work was the foundation for the IBM chess-playing computer Deep Blue which beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Life and career

Anantharaman obtained a B.Tech. degree in Electronics in 1982 from the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (now Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi).^[1] He got (in 1977) IIT-JEE rank (AIR) # 2. Anantharaman went to USA and joined Carnegie Mellon University as a PhD student where he worked on the chess playing computers ChipTest and DeepThought with Feng-hsiung Hsu. Anantharaman received his PhD degree in 1990 and joined the field of biotechnology and Feng-hsiung Hsu joined IBM to design the Deep Blue IBM super-computer, which defeated Garry Kasparov in the historic chess match.

In 1985, Carnegie Mellon University graduate students Feng-hsiung Hsu, Anantharaman, Murray Campbell and Andreas Nowatzyk used spare chips they'd found to put together a chess-playing machine that they called ChipTest. By 1987, the machine, integrating some innovative ideas about search strategies, had become the reigning computer chess champion. A successor, Deep Thought, using two special-purpose chips, plus about 200 off-the-shelf chips, working in parallel, achieved grandmaster-level play.^[2]

Following this work, Anantharaman focused his attentions into the field of biostatistics and the application of Bayesian methods to the analysis of single molecule Optical Mapping technologies. He is currently a Senior Bioinformatics Software Engineer at BioNano Genomics, San Diego, California.