Arthur John Roycroft (born 25 July 1929, London) is an

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to disti ...

endgame study In the game of chess, an endgame study, or just study, is a composed position—that is, one that has been made up rather than played in an actual game—presented as a sort of puzzle, in which the aim of the solver is to find the essentially uniqu ...

composer and author.

Chess career

In 1959 he was awarded the title

International Judge of Chess Compositions International Judge of Chess Compositions is a title award by FIDE via the World Federation for Chess Composition (WFCC; until 2010 ''Permanent Commission of the FIDE for Chess Compositions'', PCCC) to individuals who have judged several chess prob ...

. 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 Harold van der Heijden is a Dutch composer of chess endgame studies. He was born in Veghel, The Netherlands, on 18 December 1960. By profession, after finishing his PhD in 2009, he is head of the Research and Development laboratory of a veterinary ...

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 ''British Chess Magazine'' is the world's oldest chess journal in continuous publication. First published in January 1881, it has appeared at monthly intervals ever since. It is frequently known in the chess world as ''BCM''. The founder and ...

'' from 1973 to 1974. Roycroft's adaptation of the Guy–

Blandford Blandford Forum ( ), commonly Blandford, is a market town in Dorset, England, sited by the River Stour about northwest of Poole. It was the administrative headquarters of North Dorset District until April 2019, when this was abolished and i ...

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 An endgame tablebase is a computerized database that contains precalculated exhaustive analysis of chess endgame positions. It is typically used by a computer chess engine during play, or by a human or computer that is retrospectively analysin ...

output on CD.

Other

Roycroft worked for IBM 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 The Turing Institute was an artificial intelligence laboratory in Glasgow, Scotland, between 1983 and 1994. The company undertook basic and applied research, working directly with large companies across Europe, the United States and Japan devel ...

, 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. He was married to Betty Roycroft for nearly 60 years until her passing in July 2020, and they have two grown up children, Jonathan - who is Director of Sports at Oxford University and Katherine - who lives in Italy and runs her own private language school.

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 * *

Chess career

Other

Literature

References

Further reading