Arthur John Roycroft (born 25 July 1929, London) is an
English chess
Chess is a board game for two players. It is an abstract strategy game that involves Perfect information, no hidden information and no elements of game of chance, chance. It is played on a square chessboard, board consisting of 64 squares arran ...
endgame study
In the game of chess, an endgame study, or just study, is a type of chess problem that starts with a composed position—i.e. one that has been made up rather than played in an actual game—where the goal is to find the essentially unique way for ...
composer and author.
Chess career
In 1959 he was awarded the title
International Judge of Chess Compositions. In 1965 he founded ''
EG'', the first long-running journal exclusively for endgame studies.
[Hooper & Whyld, p. 346] Roycroft served as editor and publisher through 1991. The journal continues to be published, but under Dutch ownership ("ARVES"). Roycroft remained its chief editor until 2007 when
Harold van der Heijden took over. His 1972 book ''Test Tube Chess'' (revised as ''The Chess Endgame Study'', 1981) is considered one of the best English-language examinations of endgame studies.
[ He also served as the endgame study editor for the '' British Chess Magazine'' from 1973 to 1974.
Roycroft's adaptation of the Guy–]Blandford
Blandford Forum ( ) is a market town in Dorset, England, on the River Stour, Dorset, River Stour, north-west of Poole. It had a population of 10,355 at the United Kingdom 2021 census, 2021 census.
The town is notable for its Georgian archit ...
code in the 1970s resulted in the Guy–Blandford–Roycroft code, an efficient way to index endgame studies – or any chess position. He also advised Ken Thompson
Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B (programmi ...
in writing programs for endgame data bases with four and five pieces. For queen and pawn against queen some results were published by Roycroft in three booklets in 1986, years ahead of full tablebase output on CD.
Other
Roycroft worked for IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
UK from 1961 until early retirement in 1987. From April 1984 to October 1985 he was seconded to Donald Michie
Donald Michie (; 11 November 1923 – 7 July 2007) was a British researcher in artificial intelligence. During World War II, Michie worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve " Tunny ...
(Machine Intelligence Research Unit, Edinburgh, followed by The Turing Institute, Glasgow). The outcome was the paper "Expert Against Oracle" in ''Machine Intelligence'' 11, Clarendon Press 1988.
John Roycroft was President of Hendon Chess Club until he moved to Oxfordshire in 2018, where he attends Cumnor Chess Club meetings.
Literature
* ''Test Tube Chess'', Faber and Faber Limited, 1972, . Revision: The Chess Endgame Study, 1981, Dover.
* ''Queen and Pawn on a2 against Queen'', Chess Endgame Consultants and Publishers, April 1986,
* ''Queen and Pawn on a6 against Queen'', Chess Endgame Consultants and Publishers, May 1986,
* ''Queen and Pawn on b7 against Queen'', Chess Endgame Consultants and Publishers, June 1986,
References
Bibliography
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Further reading
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Roycroft, John
1929 births
English chess players
Chess composers
British chess writers
English non-fiction writers
Living people
IBM employees
International Judges of Chess Compositions
English male non-fiction writers