User:Fduniho

I am Dr. Fergus Duniho. Since I can fully edit this page, and I don't think Wikipedia is going away anytime soon, this will be my main About page.

Bio

I was born in Plattsburgh, NY on April 23, 1967. Because of birth defects, I was rushed up the Montreal Children's Hospital, where I had surgery on my esophagus to connect it to my stomach. My other birth defects were a missing thumb and radius on my left arm and a partial thumb on my right hand. The partial thumb was hanging on my a thread and was removed, leaving something like an outie belly button where it was cut off. So, I have no thumbs, and my left arm is not as fully capable as my right. It cannot form a fist or fully grip something. However, my left arm is sort of prehensile. It is jointed more like a finger, and I can use it to grab things that are larger than I could grab with my hand.

On July 20, 1969, I watched the moon landing on TV at my maternal grandparents' house. This is my earliest datable memory, and it started an early interest in space and technology.

On December 11, 1970, my brother Kevin was born. He was able-bodied and eventually became an athlete and a physical therapist.

During the early 70s, my parents started selling used books in a bookmobile, which they would drive to a shopping plaza and park. In 1975, they bought a building in downtown Plattsburgh and founded the Corner-Stone Bookshop. When not at home or school, I spent a lot of time there, reading comic books and books.

I also spent time at the Public Library, and around 1980, I discovered the Apple ][ computer there is the children's room. I quickly started to learn BASIC programming on this computer, but since Apples were expensive, I bought the much less expensive Commodore Vic 20 for myself. I continued learning BASIC on this, and I also studied BASIC programming on TRS-80s in a computer class at school.

I had originally intended to study computer programming in college, and I might be richer today if I had. But because I was starting to enjoy my English classes in high school and thought I could be a writer, I started college as an English Literature major. After taking an Introduction to Philosophy course, I got very interested in philosophy, and I started double majoring in English Literature and Philosophy. But because I dropped a course that was required for the English Literature major, I dropped that major and continued only with a Philosophy major. With that change, my logic courses no longer fulfilled certain requirements that had to be met by courses outside my major, and I took a class on Calculus and another on the programming language Pascal. By this time, I had a Commodore 128, and with some Pascal software I bought for it, I used it to do my Pascal homework. This was a very valuable course, because it taught me about recursion and structured programming. One of the most influential courses I took in college was The Philosophy of Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. This inspired me to take up an interest in artificial intelligence.

During the summer after college, I spent my time programming a real-time synthesizer on my Commodore 128. At this time, computers were very slow. When I wrote BASIC programs for playing music with the computer keyboard, they key strokes would fill up in the buffer, playing music after I touched a key instead of while I was touching it. To get it to be responsive in real-time, I wrote a machine language program that read the keys and played the music, and to change the parameters of the sound, I wrote a BASIC program that would rewrite the machine language program. Since I needed more memory than I normally had available, I cannibalized the screen memory used for the 40-column display for the machine language program, which meant I could run the program only in 80-column mode. I wanted to publish this in a magazine, but before long, the Commodore magazines were going out of business.

In the fall, I went to graduate school at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to study Philosophy. I took a class on AI with Selmer Bringsjord, but I found the texts very dry and boring. Although I had hoped to study AI further under him, he took a vacation during my second semester, and I switched to working on the mind/body problem for my master's thesis. I stayed at RPI for two years, and while there, I bought a used Amiga 500. After getting my Master of Science in Philosophy at RPI, I continued graduate school at the University of Rochester.

Shortly before going to Rochester, I joined GEnie, which was a dial-up service provided by General Electric for participating in forum discussions with other people. Perhaps during my first year at Rochester, I took the time to read a book on the C programming language. When I took a summer job and my boss asked me to write up an idea of mine for his programmers, I wrote it in C. So he moved me from grunt work to computer programming. This gave me the opportunity to program in C on Unix computers. I didn't keep with this after the summer, because I had to focus on Philosophy. But I had made enough money to buy an Amiga 3000.

After taking various Philosophy courses, I began working on my dissertation, which was on what it means for a person to evil. While working on this, I moved to downtown Rochester, and my mother bought me a Windows 95 PC. The web had recently appeared by this time, and I took the opportunity to renew an old interest in Chess variants by downloading software that would play them. In 1998, a new program called Zillions-of-Games came out, which allowed people to design and program Chess variants that could be played with it. I started designing new games with it, and I submitted the first original new game that got published on their site, Cavalier Chess. With an interest in Chess variants, I was puttering around the Chess Variant Pages, and I noticed that David Howe, one of the people in charge of the site, had an email address with the local phone company in Rochester. So I asked him if he was local, it turned out that he was, and we started meeting on a weekly basis to play different Chess variants in person.

To be continued.

Social Media Links

These pages are all by or of me, and this is verified by the crosslinking. Putting the various pieces together, they indicate the following about me:

I have a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Rochester.
My Ph.D. Dissertation is on what an evil person is.
I am the creator of several Chess variants.
I have programmed several games for Zillions of Games.
I am the webmaster for the Chess Variant Pages.
I am the creator of Game Courier and its GAME Code programming language.
I did the web site the Corner-Stone Bookshop in Plattsburgh, NY.

To fill in more details, I was born in Plattsburgh in 1967, and I spent many years at the Corner-Stone Bookshop, which my parents founded together. As a child, I went to school at the YMCA Nursery School, Cumberland Head Elementary School, and Beekmantown High School. I attended college at SUNY Plattsburgh. I attended graduate school at Rensellear Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY and the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY. As a graduate student, I taught Philosophy courses at both schools. Since getting my Ph.D., I have taught some Philosophy courses at SUNY Plattsburgh.