Berliner was born in Berlin. One of his classmates at school was future Estonian PresidentLennart Meri, whose father was serving as Estonia's ambassador to Germany. In 1937, the 8 year old Berliner's family, who were Jewish, moved to America to escape Nazi persecution, taking up residence in Washington, D.C. He learned chess at age 13, and "it quickly became his main preoccupation." Berliner is mentioned in "How I Started To Write", an essay by Carlos Fuentes, where he is described as "an extremely brilliant boy", with "a brilliant mathematical mind". "I shall always remember his face, dark and trembling, his aquiline nose and deep-set, bright eyes with their great sadness, the sensitivity of his hands..." In 1949, he became a master, won the District of Columbia Championship and the Southern States Championship, and tied for second place with Larry Evans at the New York State Championship. He also won the 1953 New York State Championship, the 1956 Eastern States Open directed by Norman Tweed Whitaker in Washington, D.C., ahead of William Lombardy, Nicolas Rossolimo, Bobby Fischer and Arthur Feuerstein, and the 1957 Champion of Champions tournament. Berliner played for his country's Olympiad team at Helsinki 1952, drawing his only game on the second reserve board. Berliner played four times in the US Chess Championship. In 1954 at New York, he scored 6½/13 to tie 8–9th places; Arthur Bisguier won. The last three times Berliner played in the U.S. Championship, Fischer won the tournament. In 1957–58 at New York, Berliner had his best result, 5th place with 7/13. In 1960–61 at New York, he scored 4½/11, tying for 8th–10th place. Finally in 1962–63 at New York, he scored 5/11 for a tied 7th–8th place. Berliner was talented at all aspects of chess. As a teenager he gave a multi-board blindfoldsimultaneous exhibition at the Washington Chess Divan, winning all six games against top local players. Berliner returned to school in 1969 to get a PhD. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1974 under the supervision of Allen Newell. His thesis was titled: "Chess as Problem Solving: The Development of a Tactics Analyzer". He died on January 13, 2017 in Riviera Beach, Florida, fourteen days away from his 88th birthday.
Correspondence play
Berliner is remembered most for his feats in correspondence play, in which games, played by mail can take days, months or even years to complete. He won the 5th World Correspondence Chess Championship in 1965, beginning the final game on April 1, 1965 and finishing three years later. He won with the extraordinary score of 14/16, a margin of victory of three points, thrice that of any other winner in these championships. Berliner's game in which he played the Two Knights Defense to defeat Yakov Estrin in the 1965 World Correspondence Chess Championship is one of the most famous and important games in correspondence chess. As of March 31, 2005, Berliner still had by far the highest International Correspondence Chess Federationrating of any player in the United States, at 2726, 84 points above the second-highest rated player. Berliner's 2726 rating places him third on the ICCF's world list, behind Joop van Oosterom and Ulf Andersson. In his 1999 book The System, Berliner claimed that the move gives White a large, and possibly decisive, advantage.
Programming
Berliner began designing computer chess programs in the early 1960s while employed by IBM. He entered Carnegie Mellon University at the age of 40 to earn a Ph.D. in computer science. While there, he came up with idea for HiTech, a more advanced chess computer program. It performed well, but only until it ran into transitions, that is, points in the game when the balance between the players changed. This led Berliner to conclude that HiTech was weak in 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, written in the late 1970s on a DEC PDP-10. Early versions of BKG played badly even against poor players, but Berliner noticed that its critical mistakes were always at transitions. He applied principles of fuzzy logic to smooth out the transition between phases, and by July 1979, BKG 9.8 was strong enough to play against the ruling world championLuigi Villa. It won the match 7–1, becoming the first computer program to defeat a world champion in any game. Berliner states that the victory was largely a matter of luck, as the computer received more favorable dice rolls. He also developed the B* search algorithm for game tree searching. Some of Berliner's PhD students, such as Carl Ebeling and Murray Campbell, went on to become noted researchers in computer chess themselves. Campbell was part of the Deep Blue team that defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997. In his later years Berliner lived in Florida and worked to develop computer chess programs.
Books
Berliner, Hans and Messere, Ken, The Fifth Correspondence World Championship, British Chess Magazine Quarterly No. 14
Notable games
Yakov Estrin–Hans Berliner, 5th CC World Ch Final 1965; Two Knights Defense, Ulvestad Variation
