John Roycroft
Arthur John Roycroft | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 25, 1929 London, England |
| Occupation(s) | Chess composer, author |
| Known for | International Judge of Chess Compositions, founder of EG magazine, author of The Chess Endgame Study |
Arthur John Roycroft (born 25 July 1929 in London) is a distinguished English composer of chess endgame studys and an accomplished author in the field.
Chess career
Roycroft was awarded the title of International Judge of Chess Compositions in 1959. He established EG in 1965, pioneering the first enduring publication dedicated solely to endgame studies, where he acted as both editor and publisher until 1991. The magazine remains active today under Dutch ownership ("ARVES"), with Roycroft serving as chief editor until 2007, when Harold van der Heijden took over. His influential book from 1972, Test Tube Chess, later revised as The Chess Endgame Study in 1981, continues to be a seminal English-language resource on endgame analysis. Additionally, Roycroft was the endgame study editor for the British Chess Magazine during 1973–1974.
In the 1970s, he enhanced the existing Guy–Blandford code by developing the Guy–Blandford–Roycroft code, a streamlined indexing method for cataloging endgame studies and chess positions. Roycroft also provided guidance to Ken Thompson on programming databases for four- and five-piece endgames. In 1986, he released three booklets detailing queen and pawn versus queen endings, preceding the availability of comprehensive tablebase data on CD.
Other
Roycroft was employed by IBM UK from 1961 until his early retirement in 1987. Between April 1984 and October 1985, he was seconded to Donald Michie’s Machine Intelligence Research Unit in Edinburgh and subsequently worked at The Turing Institute, Glasgow. During this period, he co-authored the paper "Expert Against Oracle," which appeared in Machine Intelligence volume 11 (1988).
He held the position of President at Hendon Chess Club until moving to Oxfordshire in 2018, where he now actively participates in meetings at Cumnor Chess Club. Roycroft was married to Betty Roycroft for nearly six decades until her passing in July 2020. They have two children: Jonathan, who serves as Director of Sports at Oxford University, and Katherine, who operates a private language school in Italy.
Literature
- Test Tube Chess, Faber and Faber Limited, 1972; revised edition titled The Chess Endgame Study, Dover, 1981.
- 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
- Gaige, Jeremy (1987). Chess Personalia, A Biobibliography. McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-2353-6. p. 363.
- Hooper, David; Whyld, Kenneth (1992). The Oxford Companion to Chess, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-280049-3.
Further reading
- Golombek, Harry (ed.) (1977). Golombek's Encyclopedia of Chess. Batsford. ISBN 0-517-53146-1. p. 106.
- Sunnucks, Anne (1970). The Encyclopaedia of Chess. St. Martins Press. ISBN 978-0709146971.