Alexander Bitman

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Alexander Bitman [1] Alexander Rafailovich Bitman, (Александр Рафаилович Битман, 1939 - September 9, 2013)

was a Russian programmer, chess master [2], and Go player [3]. Alexander Bitman was co-developer and Chess adviser of the ITEP Chess Program at Alexander Kronrod’s laboratory at the Moscow Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP). At the end of 1966 the four game match began between the Kotok-McCarthy-Program, running on a IBM 7090 computer, and the ITEP Chess Program on a Soviet M-20 computer. The match played over nine months was won 3-1 by the ITEP program. Alexander Bitman became member of the Kaissa team [4], which won the First World Computer Chess Championship 1974 in Stockholm. In 1988, after Kaissa’s retirement, Bitman was tournament director of the First Soviet Computer-Chess Championship in Ulan-Ude [5].

On September 9, 2013, Alexander Rafailovich Bitman was killed by a hit-and-run car accident at the Institute of Systems Analysis, Bersenevskaya waterfront in Moscow [6].

Photos

Vladimir Arlazarov, Alexander Bitman and Alexander Zhivotovsky, ITEP, November 24, 1967 [7]

Quotes

Tony Marsland and Monty Newborn in their report of their USSR visit, December 1980 [8]:

We arrived in Moscow on December 7th and spent several days in technical talks at the [Institute for System Studies](Institute_of_Control_Sciences "Institute of Control Sciences") with the [Kaissa](Kaissa "Kaissa") group - [Mikhail Donskoy](Mikhail_Donskoy "Mikhail Donskoy"), [Vladimir Arlazarov](Vladimir_Arlazarov "Vladimir Arlazarov"),  [Georgy Adelson-Velsky](Georgy_Adelson-Velsky "Georgy Adelson-Velsky"), Alexander Bitman, and [Anatoly Uskov](Anatoly_Uskov "Anatoly Uskov"). Bitman, a master level player, easily outplayed the [Chess Sensory Challenger](Chess_Challenger "Chess Challenger") which we brought along with us for demonstration purposes ...