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 won the 1956 Eastern States Open Chess Championship directed by Norman Tweed Whitaker in Washington, DC ahead of William Lombardy, Nicholas Rossolimo, Bobby Fischer and Arthur Feuerstein. He played several times in the US Chess Championship. However, he gave up tournament chess to become the world's leading correspondence chess player and computer chess programmer.

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, which became the first program to defeat a world champion in any game when it defeated Luigi Villa in June 1979.

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1929 births | Living people | American chess players | Chess players | Jewish chess players | American backgammon players

Hans Berliner | Hans Berliner