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Hans Berliner

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Hans Jack Berliner (born Berlin, Germany, January 27, 1929), a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, is a former World Correspondence Chess Champion, from 1965-1968. He is a Grandmaster of Correspondence Chess, and an International Master for over-the-board chess. He directed the construction of the chess computer HiTech. Berliner is also a chess writer.

1 Life and Career
2 Books
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

Life and Career

He was born in Berlin, but when he was eight years old he moved with his family to America. He learned chess at age 13, and went on to play in several U.S. Championships and earn a spot on his country's Olympiad team at Helsinki 1952, drawing his only game on the second reserve board. He won the 1956 Eastern States Open Chess Championship directed by Norman Tweed Whitaker in Washington, DC, ahead of William Lombardy, Nicolas Rossolimo, Bobby Fischer and Arthur Feuerstein. Berliner played four times in the US Chess Championship. In 1954 at New York, he scored 6.5/13 to tie 8-9th places; the winner was Arthur Bisguier. In 1957-58 at New York, he had his best result of 5th place with 7/13 as Bobby Fischer won. In 1960-61 at New York, he scored 4.5/11 for a tied 8-10th place as Fischer won again. Finally in 1962-63 at New York, he scored 5/11 for a tied 7-8th place with Fischer winning once more. [source: http//www.chessmetrics.com, the Berliner player file.] However, Berliner is remembered most for his feats in correspondence play, most notably his victory in the 5th World Correspondence Chess Championship in 1965 with the score of 14/16. His book "The System" describes his rigorous and scientific approach to chess analysis. He currently lives in Florida, and has worked to help develop computer chess programs in his later years. While programming HiTech, Berliner was having trouble implementing board evaluation. He decided that to explore the problem, he should write an evaluation function for another game: backgammon. The result was BKG 9.8, written in the late 1970s on a DEC PDP-10. Early versions of BKG played badly even against poor players, but Berliner noticed that its critical mistakes were always at transitions. He applied principles of fuzzy logic to smooth out the transition between phases, and by July 1979, BKG 9.8 was strong enough to play against the ruling world champion Luigi Villa. It won the match, 7-1, becoming the first computer program to defeat a world champion in any game. Berliner states that the victory was largely a matter of luck, as the computer received more favorable dice rolls.^[1] He also developed the B* search algorithm for game tree searching. Hans Berliner is mentioned in Carlos Fuentes essay, "How I Started To Write," where he is described as "an extremely brilliant boy," with "a brilliant mathematical mind." "I shall always remember his face, dark and trembling, his aquiline nose and deep-set, bright eyes with their great sadness, the sensitivity of his hands..." (The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate, 1995, pp. 435-436). Berliner's game in which he played the Two Knights Defense to defeat Yakov Estrin is one of the most famous and important games in correspondence chess (Burgess, Nunn & Emms 2004:309-15).