Vanguard
From game programming to discovering the mystery of life
TOMITA, Masaru
ProfessorFaculty of Environment and Information Studies
Those college days when I made money by game programming
When I was an undergraduate student,
all second year students were expected to take the programming
course, which I did not find interesting. For example in class, we
had to use Newton's method to derive a circle ratio "π",
but I was not so excited about using programming method to obtain an
answer we already knew. At that time the Space Invaders game was
extremely popular. The game was designed in such a manner that if the
player cleared all the stages, the game would start all over again. I
became so skillful at clearing the stages that the game never ended.
Then I thought it would be fun to change the rules to make it more
difficult. Thus I started to self-study programming and create my own
games. I made Breakout or similar games and sold them to shops in
Akihabara Electric Town. At times these games took three days and
nights to design, and I could sell each game for about 800,000 yen.
It was quite good earning for a university student like me.
I sensed the limits of computer programming
No longer satisfied with creating
action games and making money, I became interested in intellectual
games. Being a dan holder in shogi or Japanese chess since junior
high school, I decided to develop a computer game of shogi.
Programming the board and displaying the movement of pieces that
followed the rules were quite easy. However, I soon realized that
programming a string of thought process into the computer to allow it
to play against human beings was quite daunting. In the game of
shogi, a player has approximately 30 possible moves per phase. This
means that a player has to come up with a cube of 30 moves in order
to speculate three phases ahead. Even some shogi beginners can
speculate 15 phases ahead in a crucial stage, and this means they can
plan 30 to the power of 15 moves ahead. Even supercomputers would
take an extraordinary length of time to scan all these patterns and
choose the best option.
Encountering an academic field called artificial intelligence
In reality, human players do not go
over all options before choosing the best to make a move. Human mind
quickly discards options that are useless, selects a few good moves
and chooses the best. In other words, humans proficiently prune the
search tree in order to make a selection. I asked my seminar
professor how to program a computer to prune the search tree. He told
me that the procedure is taught in a field called artificial
intelligence. He revealed to me that no Japanese laboratory has yet
specialized in artificial intelligence, and if I was serious about
studying the field, then I should go to the United States. I did some
research about my options and decided to study under Professor
Herbert Alexander Simon, the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economics for research in artificial intelligence (more accurately,
decision-making), at the School of Computer Science in Carnegie
Mellon University.
Understanding the limits of computers, I sensed the mystery of human life
Though I faced many hardships, I
finally managed to acquire a master's degree and a doctoral degree
from Carnegie Mellon University. Afterwards, as Professor Simon's
Research Associate and then as an Associate Professor, I continued to
conduct research mainly in machine translation. With the
establishment of SFC, I returned to Japan but continued my research
in machine translation. The task of designing a machine translation
system is quite difficult. Incorporating grammatical rules and
dictionary functions into a computer may give it the ability to
perform a literal translation, but still it will not be able to match
the skill of professional translators. Understanding the meaning of
sentences, and amalgamating common sense with human knowledge are
necessary to make proper translation. In short, a programmer has to
program all aspects of human knowledge into a computer in order to
translate properly. This procedure is as difficult as creating the
human brain. It is rather difficult for a computer to do things that
the human brain can do easily. On the contrary, a human brain,
starting with a fertilized egg, develops automatically in about five
years through repeated cell divisions. This is quite an amazing
process!
Becoming a medical student while being a teacher
The more I studied artificial
intelligence, the more I became interested in human mechanism and its
ability to create an intelligent system through cell division. This
was the time when researchers around the world had just started
analyzing the human genome, which is comprised of the letter string
ATGC. Since the object of machine translation was also a series of
letter strings, I thought I could apply my research findings to
genome analysis. The only hitch was that in order to research in this
field, I needed knowledge of molecular biology. I felt that if I had
to acquire this knowledge, I should become a student of the Graduate
School of Medicine. My only concern was that if I started studying
biology while being a computer science teacher at SFC, I might not be
able to show any substantial research results in a short time. I took
my concern to Professor Hideo Aiso, then Dean of the Faculty of
Environment and Information Studies. He advised me: “Don't get
obsessed with getting immediate results and confining yourself to one
area alone. It is vital for a professor at SFC to open the way in new
research fields.” The late thirties of a researcher is an important
stage in his life. With Professor Aiso’s encouraging words during
those crucial years, I overcame the fear of leaving a blank period in
my research career. I then decided to wear two hats for four years,
one as a professor at SFC and the other as a student at the Graduate
School of Medicine, Keio University.
Study together, search together
Since my enrollment as a student at the
Graduate School of Medicine, biology has become the theme of my
seminar at SFC. Whereas professors would generally teach a field
after having explored it themselves, my policy is to study and
conduct research together with my students. SFC offers a unique
environment to allow this to happen. Analyzing the genome string with
a computer revealed to me many secrets of life. It is exciting for me
to discover something unknown, things that are not in textbook, and
things that nobody in the world knows about. It is also exciting for
students to experience these things together. SFC offers seminars in
various fields so that students do not need to limit their interest
to a single area of study upon enrollment. They can participate in
seminars from their first year and shift into other areas later on,
if their subject of interest changes. This allows students to expand
their investigative curiosity and discover their own research themes.
SFC is an ideal university campus for students with such an ambition.
A Brief Background of Professor
TOMITA, Masaru
Professor Tomita graduated from Keio University with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics in 1981. After his graduation, he enrolled in Carnegie Mellon University and acquired a master’s degree in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 1985, both the degrees were in Computer Science. He conducted research at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, as a research assistant. He was promoted to the position of a Research Associate (1985) and then an Associate Professor (1987). From 1987 he has held the position of Associate Director at the Center for Machine Translation. In 1990, Professor Tomita returned to Japan and took a position of an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, initially established when the Shonan Fujisawa Campus was opened. He was appointed Professor in 1997. While he was teaching, he acquired a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University (1994), and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Graduate School of Medicine, Keio University (1998). He was the Dean for the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies from 2005 to 2007, and has been the Director of the Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences since 2001. Major Honors: Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, USA(1988); IBM Japan Science Prize(2002); Minister of Science and Technology Policy Award in recognition for industry-academia-government collaboration performance(2004); Prize for Science and Technology of the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology(2007)
Laboratory for Advanced Biosciences, Keio University
Institute for Advanced Biosciences, Keio University
(22 May 2009)
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