Hans Berliner

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Hans Jack Berliner (born January 27, 1929) Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, is a former World Correspondence Chess Champion. He directed the construction of the chess computer HiTech.

He was born in Berlin, but when he was eight years old he moved with his family to America. He learned chess at age thirteen and went on to play in several U.S. Championships and earn a spot on his country's Olympiad team in 1952. 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. He played several times in the US Chess Championship. However, he is remembered most for his feats in correspondence play, most notably his victory in the 5th World Correspondence Chess Championship 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 programmes 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 phase changes. 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]

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).