Stefan Meyer-Kahlen is a German programmer of the computer chess program "Shredder". His program had won 10 titles as World Computer Chess Champion as of January 1, 2006. Four of the titles were blitz championships. Shredder 9.0 has a rating of 2818 on the January 3, 2006 SSDF rating list. He also invented the Universal Chess Interface, a chess engine protocol.

Vasik Rajlich (b. 1971 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an International Master in chess and the author of Rybka, one of the strongest chess playing programs in the world. Rajlich is a dual Czech-American citizen by birth; he was born in the United States of America to Czech parents, at that time graduate students, but grew up in Prague. He later spent many years in the United States as a student at MIT. At the present he lives with his wife Iweta (née Radziewicz) in Budapest, …

David Neil Lawrence Levy (b. March 14 1945), in London, is a Scottish International Master chess player and businessman, celebrated for his involvement with computer chess, the Computer Olympiads (founder), and the Mind Sports Olympiads (founder). He has written more than 40 books on chess and computers. In 1972, at the Skopje Chess Olympiad, he played Board 1 for the Scottish team.

Dr. Robert (Bob) Hyatt is an Associate Professor of Computer science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of the computer chess program Crafty and the co-author of Cray Blitz, a two-time winner of the World Computer Chess Championships. Dr. Hyatt earned both a Bachelor's degree in 1970 and a Master's degree in 1983 from The University of Southern Mississippi. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1988.

Feng-hsiung Hsu (Cantonese: Heoi2 Fung1 Hung4) (nicknamed Crazy Bird) is the author of the book "Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion" (ISBN 0-691-09065-3). He started his graduate work at Carnegie Mellon University in the field of computer chess in the year 1985. In 1988 he was part of the "Deep Thought" team that won the Fredkin Intermediate Prize for Deep Thought's Grandmaster-level performance.

Hans Jack Berliner (born January 27, 1929), a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, is a former World Correspondence Chess Champion. He directed the construction of the chess computer HiTech. He was born in Berlin, but when he was eight years old he moved with his family to America. He learned chess at age 13, and went on to play in several U.S. Championships and earn a spot on his country's Olympiad team in 1952.

Frederic Friedel, born in 1945, studied Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Hamburg and in Oxford, graduating with a thesis on speech act theory and moral language. He started a university career but switched to science journalism, producing documentaries for German TV. He also joined an American sceptical society; CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigtion of Claims of the Paranormal) and investigated/debunked several such claims.

Eugene Nalimov (born 1965 in Novosibirsk, former U.S.S.R.) is a chess programmer and Microsoft employee. Starting in 1998, he wrote a tablebase generator which included many different endgames. He received a ChessBase award at the ChessBase meeting in Maastricht in 2002 for his work. Nalimov has an M.Sc. from Novosibirsk State University. He started a Ph.D. dissertation, but did not finish it.

Alan Kotok was an American computer scientist. He was known for his contributions to the Internet and World Wide Web through his work at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to computer engineering through his work at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and to gaming for his work on computer game and computer chess programs built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Kotok recorded a video oral history at the Computer History Museum in 2004.

Duncan Suttles (b. 21 December 1945) is an International Grandmaster of chess who was the strongest Canadian player between Abe Yanofsky and Kevin Spraggett. He is one of the few over-the-board grandmasters who also holds the title of Grandmaster of Correspondence Chess. He has been inactive in over-the-board play for some time, since the mid-1980s, but is a significant figure in computer chess through his involvement with Magnetar Games, …

Christian Donninger, also known as "Chrilly", is the main programmer of the chess computer Hydra, which is likely the strongest chess computer in the world as of early 2006. Donninger, from Austria, has a Ph.D. in Mathematical Statistics, and specializes in FPGA programming. He was the author of earlier chess engines Brutus and Nimzo.

Alick E. Glennie (1925-2003) was a British computer scientist, most famous for having developed Autocode, which many people regard as the first ever computer compiler. Glennie worked with Alan Turing on several projects, including the Manchester Mark I/II. He also played the first ever game of computer chess, although it was played against a program not capable of being run on the computers of the day: the chess program was devised by Alan Turing, …

Aleksandr (Alexander) Semenovich Kronrod (Russian "Александр Семёнович Кронрод") (October 22, 1921 - October 6, 1986) was a Russian mathematician and computer scientist, best known for the Gauss-Kronrod quadrature which he published in 1964. Earlier his computations informed theoretical physics. He is also known for his contributions to economics, specifically for proposing corrections and calculating price formation for the USSR.

Michael Valvo (April 19 1942 in New York - September 18 2004 in Chanhassen, Minnesota) was an International Master of chess. By 1962, he was one of the top blitz players in the United States. He won the 1963 U.S. Intercollegiate Championship. A native of Albany, N.Y. and a graduate of Columbia University, Valvo was a member of the U.S. team that competed in the 11th Student Olympiad in Cracow, Poland, in 1964.

Zvonko Vranesic is a Croatian–Canadian International Master of chess. He is an Electrical Engineer, a university professor, and a developer of computer chess software. Vranesic won the Junior Championship of Yugoslavia in 1957. He immigrated to Canada in October 1958. He graduated in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto, earning bachelor and doctoral degrees. He began competing with success in Canadian chess tournaments, soon after his arrival.

Georgy Maximovich Adelson-Velsky is a Russian mathematician and computer scientist. Along with E.M. Landis, he invented the AVL tree in 1962. In 1965, Adelson-Velsky headed the development of a computer chess program at the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow. The program defeated Kotok-McCarthy in the first chess match between computer programs, and evolved into Kaissa, the first world computer chess champion.

Aleksandr L'vovich Brudno (Alexander Lvovich Brudno) (b. 1918) is a Russian computer scientist, best known for fully describing the alpha-beta (α-β) search algorithm.