January 17 2017
Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Honolulu, Hawaii, Tuesday, January 17, 2017
Hans Berliner, 87, master chess player and pioneering programmer
Hans Berliner 1929-2017
By Dylan Loeb McClain, New York Times
Hans Berliner, a former world champion of correspondence chess who won one of the greatest games ever played on his way to the title and later became a pioneering developer of game-playing computers, died Friday in Riviera Beach, Fla. He was 87.
His death was confirmed by Carl Ebeling, a former student who retired in 2012 as a computer science professor at the University of Washington, who is handling Berliner's estate.
Berliner was an expert at correspondence chess, in which moves can be sent by postcard or, more recently, the internet. Players have days to think about each move, and games usually last months or even years. When Berliner won the Fifth World Correspondence Chess Championship, the final began on April Fool's Day in 1965 and did not end until three years later.
Berliner's margin of victory in the final was 3 points, the largest in history. But it was his game against Yakov Estrin, a Russian correspondence grandmaster who finished 13th in the field of 17, that followers of chess remember.
Berliner, playing Black, essayed the Two Knights Defense, one of the more complicated openings. For many months the players traded what would be described as haymakers in boxing, with each attacking, only to be met with a counterattack. After an incredible series of moves, the game wound down to a rook-and-pawn ending that Berliner won.
Andy Soltis, a grandmaster of over-the-board (conventional) play, ranked the game No. 1 in his book “The 100 Best Chess Games of the 20th Century” (2000). Over the years the game was often analyzed by people using increasingly powerful chess computers, but only a few small improvements in the moves of both players were ever found.
Berliner was also an accomplished over-the-board player. He was an international master, the rank just below grandmaster.
In the early 1960s, inspired by the work of programming pioneers in artificial intelligence, Berliner, who was working at IBM at the time, began writing a program to play chess.
At 40, just after becoming world correspondence champion, Berliner entered Carnegie Mellon University to pursue a doctorate in computer science. Afterward he joined the university's faculty.
As he worked to create a chess computer, he decided to look for a solution by programming a computer to play what he thought was a simpler game: backgammon.
In July 1979 his program played and won a match, 7-1, against Luigi Villa, the reigning world backgammon champion.
Berliner returned to building a chess computer.
In spring 1985 the new computer, HiTech, made its debut. It quickly ascended to the rank of master and then to senior master, becoming the strongest chess computer. In 1988 it became the first computer to beat a grandmaster in a match, defeating Arnold Denker, 3.5 to 0.5, though Denker was well past his prime.
