John Gaschnig

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John G. Gaschnig, (June 24, 1950 - March 4, 1982) ¹
was an American electrical engineer, computer scientist and AI researcher from Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International, Menlo Park, California, where he was best known for his work on expert systems, notably the PROSPECTOR geological exploration system ², developed at SRI.

Research on Search

Already in 1973, at Carnegie Mellon University, along with Samuel Fuller and James Gillogly, Gaschnig analyzed the alpha-beta algorithm ³. He received a B.Sc. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and defended his Ph.D. in 1979 on performance measurement and analysis of certain search algorithms at Carnegie Mellon, under supervision of Herbert Simon ⁴. John Gaschnig further introduced the backjumping technique to reduce the search space in backtracking algorithms ⁵.

Selected Publications

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1973 ...

• John Gaschnig (1973). Description of Visual Texture by Computers. Vision Flash 39, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Robotics Section, pdf
• Samuel Fuller, John Gaschnig, James Gillogly (1973). An Analysis of the Alpha-Beta Pruning Algorithm. Technical Report, Carnegie Mellon University, pdf
• John Gaschnig (1977). A General Backtrack Algorithm That Eliminates Most Redundant Tests. IJCAI 1977
• John Gaschnig (1977). Exactly How Good Are Heuristics?: Toward a Realistic Predictive Theory of Best-First Search. IJCAI 1977, pdf
• John Gaschnig (1978). Surveyor's Forum: Experimental Analysis Discretely Done. ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 10, No. 3
• John Gaschnig (1979). Performance Measurement and Analysis of Certain Search Algorithms. Ph.D. thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, pdf

1980 ...

• John Gaschnig (1980). An Application of the Prospector System to DOE's National Uranium Resource Evaluation. AAAI 1980
• Nils J. Nilsson (1982) In Memoriam: John G. Gaschnig. AI Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 2

References