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title: John Birmingham

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John Birmingham [1] John A. Birmingham,

a British computer scientist and programmer from Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment, near Harwell, Oxfordshire, in the neighborhood of Atlas Computer Laboratory, Chilton. In the early 70s, John Birmingham became interested in chess programming, inspired by the work of Peter Kent from Atlas, who already inproved Alex Bell's program, which was written in Algol. He translated the program, plus all the new improvements, into PL/l and also extended the depth of the search. In 1973 Alex Bell joined the team to develop the chess playing program Minimax algorithm Tester, short Master, which competed the first three World Computer Chess Championships [2], from 1975 with Birmingham [3] and Kent as sole authors. Both authors further improved Master, and as scientists, talked about their secrets in tree searching techniques and Mate at a Glance during the first two Advances in Computer Chess conferences, published as Proceedings by Mike Clarke, and reprinted in David Levy's Computer Chess Compendium.

[5]

John Birmingham, Peter Kent (1977). Tree-searching and tree-pruning techniques. Advances in Computer Chess 1, (Ed. M.R.B. Clarke), pp. 89–107. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. ISBN 0-852-24292-1. reprinted in Computer Chess Compendium by D.N.L. Levy (ed.), pp. 123-128
John Birmingham, Peter Kent [6] (1980). Mate at a Glance. Advances in Computer Chess 2, (Ed. M.R.B. Clarke), pp. 122–130. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. ISBN 0-85224-377-4. reprinted in Computer Chess Compendium by D.N.L. Levy (ed.), pp. 258-265