John Roycroft

Arthur John Roycroft ( born July 15, 1929 in Alperton, England ) is an English chess player, author and composer study.

Roycroft was employed for 26 years until his retirement in the IBM company in England and then joined the group Machine Intelligence by Donald Michie at the University of Edinburgh.

Since 1950, he composed more than 40 studies, inspired by meetings with Harold Lommerange and Hugh Blandford. Three of them came in the FIDE Albums. Inspired by the solvent competition for endgame studies in the weekly chess column in the New Statesman and some radio broadcasts about endgame studies at the BBC was formed around him a loose community of interest that led to the creation of The Chess Endgame Study Circle. As of July 1964 in its Quarterly Journal of EC, its editor and publisher, he was released.

Roycrofts merits lie less in his compositions, but rather in the comprehensive popularization of chess study. In 1959 he was International Judge for Chess Compositions ( studies). In the seventies he put a relative end point in the development of the GBR codes. Roycroft is a founding member of the Subcommission on studies in the PCCC, which was formed on the initiative of Gia Nadareischwili, and their long- time spokesman he was.

Unique his book Test Tube Chess is (revised as The Chess Endgame Study, 1981). In the chapter " Cook Hunter: Friend or Fiend with Microscope " is compelling and vividly described the dialectic of activities between composer and solver, between synthesis and analysis in chess composition.

Less well known is his share in the development of the 5- figures endgame databases together with Ken Thompson, whose technical advisor he was. On a chess course in 1988 at the Technical University of Dresden, he reported it in words and pictures. Long before the time was ripe for dissemination of this information on CD, Roycroft tried to publish some of the new findings obtained from both the women's final as brochures. Of the 38 planned expenditure of Roycroft 's 5 -man Chess Endgame Series but appeared only three. The project was too little paragraph and was financially a flop.

Works

• John Roycroft: Test Tube Chess, Faber and Faber Limited, 1972, ISBN 0-571-09573-9
• John Roycroft: Queen and Pawn on a2 against Queen, Chess Endgame Consultants and Publishers, April 1986, ISBN 1-869874-00-5
• John Roycroft: Queen and pawn on a6 against Queen, Chess Endgame Consultants and Publishers, May 1986 ISBN 1-869874-05-6
• John Roycroft: Queen and Pawn on b7 against Queen, Chess Endgame Consultants and Publishers, June 1986, ISBN 1-869874-10-2
• John Roycroft: Richard Guy 's Chess Endgame Studies. Prime Actions, Kenneth Solja, Helsinki, 1996. ISBN 951-96771-3-5
• John Roycroft (ed.): Hugh Blandford: Published Works & Laptops. Russell Enterprises. 1998, ISBN 1-888690-03-8