Alexander Rafailovich Bitman (born 1939),
is a Russian programmer and chess master.

Alexander Bitman was co-developer and Chess adviser of the ITEP Chess Program at Alexander Kronrod’s laboratory at the Moscow Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP). At the end of 1966 the four game match began between the Kotok-McCarthy-Program, running on a IBM 7090 computer, and the ITEP Chess Program on a Soviet M-20 computer. The match played over nine months was won 3-1 by the ITEP program.

Alexander Bitman became member of the Kaissa [was a quite sophisticated program for that time. It used Bitboards for the internal Board Representation and advanced search techniques, notably already the idea of Null Move Pruning] team, which won the first World Computer Chess Champion in 1974 in Stockholm.

(source https://chessprogramming.wikispaces...)

deadly hitten by a car in Moscow