David Levy

David Neil Laurence Levy (born 14 March 1945) is an English International Master of chess and a businessman. He is noted for his involvement with computer chess and artificial intelligence and as the founder of the Computer Olympiads and the Mind Sports Olympiads. He has written more than 40 books on chess and computers.

Levy was born in London and went to Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet. He won the London Junior Chess Championship in 1965 and 1966. He won the Scottish Chess Championship in 1968. He tied for fifth place at the 1969 Praia da Rocha Zonal tournament, scoring over two-thirds and thereby obtaining the title of International Master. He played on Board One for the Scottish team at the 1972 Chess Olympiad in Skopje, Yugoslavia, scoring six wins, five draws, and seven losses (47.2%).

Levy became a professional chess writer in 1971. Several of his books were co-written with English Grandmaster Raymond Keene. Levy was married to Keene's sister Jacqueline for 17 years. He has functioned as a literary agent for the escaped Great Train robber, Ronald Biggs, and claims to have masterminded his escape from British justice. In 1974, Levy, together with Monty Newborn and Ben Mittman, organized the first World Computer Chess Championship. In 1978, he co-founded the International Computer Chess Association.

In the late 1970s, Levy consulted with Texas Instruments on the development of the Chess module for the TI-99/4A Home Computer Project and went on to set up Intelligent Software to produce chess software and hardware for a number of companies, including Milton Bradley.[6] Intelligent Software would later collapse as a result of its involvement in the failed Enterprise home computer.

In 1997, he founded the team that won the Loebner Prize for the program called "CONVERSE." The prize competition rewards the program that is best able to simulate human communication. Levy entered the contest again in 2009 and won. From 1986 to 1992 and from 1999 to 2018, he was the president of the International Computer Games Association. He was Chairman of the Rules and Arbitration Committee for the Kasparov vs. Deep Junior chess match in New York City in 2003. Levy once started a business called Tiger Computer Security with a computer hacker, Mathew Bevan.

Levy also wrote Love and Sex with Robots, published in the United States in 2007 by HarperCollins and in paperback in 2009 by Duckworth in the UK. It is the commercial edition of his Ph.D. thesis, which he defended successfully on 11 October 2007 at Maastricht University, Netherlands. On 17 January 2008, he appeared on the late-night television show The Colbert Report to promote his book. In September 2009, Levy predicted that sex robots would hit the market within a couple of years. 

He defended his controversial views on the potential future wide use of sex robots by the public, and also by sex offenders, in an interview with The Guardian newspaper in December 2015. Levy has also been working on a range of sexually erotic chatbots, which have been created by a team based in a lab in Malaysia. However, his research into human-robot sexual relations has not been viewed favorably by the Malaysian authorities, who ruled the 2015 Congress on Love and Sex with Robots, which was due to be co-chaired by Levy, as illegal following the organizers' attempt to imply the Malaysian governments' endorsement by using the Tourism Malaysia logo on their website. 

The Congress on Love and Sex with Robots was again canceled in 2018. Initially, committee members of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE) objected to plans to partner with the two events in Montana. Springer Nature canceled plans to publish the proceedings due to a lack of academic papers. Further controversy then arose over the invitation of Steve Bannon to keynote at ACE, leading to both events being canceled.

Levy was brought into a new company called Retro Computers Ltd by his friend Sir Clive Sinclair. This company was formed after a meeting with Sinclair and Paul Andrews, who conceived the ZX Spectrum Vega games console. This was backed by members of the public on a crowdfunding site raising over £150,000 in 2015 and delivered successfully to backers that same year. A second portable console, the ZX Spectrum Vega+, was proposed and crowd-funded again, but two of the four founding directors (Paul Andrews and Chris Smith) left the company in April 2016 before the crowdfunding finished. They left, citing irreconcilable differences between them and the last remaining director Levy. 

Levy continued with the company installing two replacement directors, Suzanne Martin and Dr. Janko Mrsic-Flogel, both long-term associates of Levy. The Vega+ console was originally intended to be delivered to backers in September 2016, but as of August 2017, the device remained unreleased amid claims of "infighting and legal battles." Despite condensed accounts being filed for the company at Companies House, no information has been provided to identify the status of funds. 

In September 2017, the company's bank statements were released, showing that by 2017 all money raised via Indiegogo had been spent by RCL with no product to show for it, but calls from the backers for Levy to explain why the company had previously told The Inquirer that the missing funds were "safe" and "ring-fenced" went unanswered. On 23 January 2019, a Petition to wind up the company was filed by Private Planet Limited, owned by Dr. Mrsic-Flogel. Liquidators were appointed on 4 April 2019, leaving backers empty-handed.