Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon who used what John McCarthy calls an "approximation" in 1958 wrote that alpha–beta "appears to have been reinvented a number of times". Arthur Samuel had an early version for a checkers simulation. Richards, Timothy Hart, Michael Levin and/or Daniel Edwards also invented alpha–beta independently in the United States. McCarthy proposed similar ideas during the Dartmouth workshop in 1956 and suggested it to a group of his students including Alan Kotok at MIT in 1961. Alexander Brudno independently conceived the alpha–beta algorithm, publishing his results in 1963. Donald Knuth and Ronald W. Moore refined the algorithm in 1975. Judea Pearl proved its optimality in terms of the expected running time for trees with randomly assigned leaf values in two papers. The optimality of the randomized version of alpha–beta was shown by Michael Saks and Avi Wigderson in 1986.
Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon who used what John McCarthy calls an "approximation" in 1958 wrote that alpha–beta "appears to have been reinvented a number of times". Arthur Samuel had an early version for a checkers simulation. Richards, Timothy Hart, Michael Levin and/or Daniel Edwards also invented alpha–beta independently in the United States. McCarthy proposed similar ideas during the Dartmouth workshop in 1956 and suggested it to a group of his students including Alan Kotok at MIT in 1961. Alexander Brudno independently conceived the alpha–beta algorithm, publishing his results in 1963. Donald Knuth and Ronald W. Moore refined the algorithm in 1975. Judea Pearl proved its optimality in terms of the expected running time for trees with randomly assigned leaf values in two papers. The optimality of the randomized version of alpha–beta was shown by Michael Saks and Avi Wigderson in 1986.