340 | 31 COmPUTER CHESS—THE fIRST mOmENTS
‘making a machine’.^33 Prinz also advocated his own version of Turing’s networks-of-neurons
approach to computing (see Chapter 29). He thought that computer engineers could take.^34
animal or human nerve fibres and somehow encourage them to form suitable networks by join-
ing up in the right places.
A chess addict, Prinz was always ready for a game. With his thick shock of dark wavy hair
and the demeanour of the traditional absent-minded professor, he would sit at the board look-
ing relaxed and slightly amused—an expression that he customarily wore when concentrating
hard. He smoked cigarillos endlessly, and when surprised would say ‘Ach’ in his thick, gravelly
German accent. ‘Ziss is a good move’, he might congratulate his opponent. A kind and pleasant
man with an acute sense of fair play, he never gloated when he won—as he very often did. Prinz
holds the title ‘First human to make an electronic computer play chess’.
He was born in Berlin in 1903 and grew up in the Tiergarten district of the city. His father was
a lawyer, but science was everything to the young Prinz. He studied physics and mathematics at
Berlin University (now Humboldt University), where he was taught by such scientific giants as
Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Subsequently, the Berlin radio and TV engineering company
Telefunken hired him to work on electronic design problems. Prinz loved Berlin, calling it ‘my
little home town’, but dark political clouds were gathering. An atheist intellectual German Jew,
he fled Germany for England three months after Hitler’s Reichstag passed the rampantly anti-
Jewish Nuremberg Laws (in September 1935). It was a terrible wrench. He never saw some of
his family members again, since they perished at the hands of the German SS.
Prinz arrived in London in January by railway from the coast, carrying two battered suitcases
and a few assorted bundles. The heavy London accents he encountered on leaving the train
figure 31.2 Dietrich Prinz.
Reproduced with permission of Dani Prinz.