Mr. Alexander L'vovich Brudno

A Russian Jewish computer scientist, he lived in Israel Since 1991. He developed the "mathematics/machine interface" for the M-2 computer constructed in 1952 at the Krzhizhanovskii laboratory of the Institute of Energy of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Soviet Union. He was a great friend of Alexander Kronrod. His work on alpha-beta was published in 1963 in Russian and English. The algorithm was used in a computer chess program written by Georgy Adelson-Velsky and others at the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEF or ITEP). According to Monty Newborn and the Computer History Museum, the algorithm was used later in Kaissa the world computer chess champion in 1974. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon who used what John McCarthy calls an "approximation" in 1958 wrote that alpha-beta "appears to have been reinvented a number of times". Arthur Samuel had an early version and Richards, Hart, Levine and/or Edwards found alpha-beta independently in the United States. McCarthy proposed similar ideas during the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 and suggested it to a group of his students including Alan Kotok at MIT in 1961. Donald Knuth and Ronald W. Moore refined the algorithm in 1975 and it continued to be advanced.