Arthur John Roycroft (born 25 July 1929 at 252 Ealing Road, Alperton, London. Jeremy Gaige in his Chess Personalia, A Biobibliography was misled by the parental home in the 1940s and 50s being in Richmond, Surrey.) is an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 chess

Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

 endgame study

Endgame study

An endgame study, or just study, is a composed chess position—that is, one that has been made up rather than one from an actual game—presented as a sort of puzzle, in which the aim of the solver is to find a way for one side to win or draw, as stipulated, against any moves the other side...

 composer and author, who lives in North West London. He is married to Betty Roycroft. He worked for IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

 UK from 1961 until early retirement in 1987. From April 1984 to October 1985 he was seconded to Donald Michie (Machine Intelligence Research Unit, Edinburgh, followed by The Turing Institute, Glasgow). The outcome was the paper Expert Against Oracle in Machine Intelligence 11, Clarendon Press 1988.

In 1959 he was awarded the title International Judge of Chess Compositions

International Judge of Chess Compositions

International Judge of Chess Compositions is a title award by FIDE via the Permanent Commission of the FIDE for Chess Compositions to individuals who have judged several chess problem or study tournaments and who are considered capable of judging such awards at the highest level.The title was...

. In 1965 he founded EG

EG (magazine)

EG is a magazine that publishes endgame studies and discusses various aspects of the endgame in chess. The letters "EG" stand for "End Game."...

, the first long-running journal exclusively for endgame studies. Roycroft served as editor and publisher through 1991. The journal continues to be published, but under Dutch ownership ("ARVES"), and Roycroft remained its chief editor until 2007 when Harold van der Heijden

Harold van der Heijden

Harold van der Heijden is a Dutch composer of chess endgame studies. He was born in Veghel, The Netherlands, on December 18, 1960. By profession, after finishing his PhD in 2009, he is head of the R&D department of a veterinary institute....

 took over. His book Test Tube Chess (Faber, 1972, ISBN 0-8117-1734-8, revised as The Chess Endgame Study, 1981) is considered one of the best English-language examinations of endgame studies. He also served as the endgame study editor for the British Chess Magazine

British Chess Magazine

British Chess Magazine is the world's oldest chess magazine in continuous publication. First published in January 1881, it has appeared at monthly intervals ever since. It is frequently known in the chess world as BCM....

from 1973-1974.

Roycroft's adaptation of the Guy-Blandford code in the 1970s resulted in the Guy-Blandford-Roycroft code, the most efficient way to index endgame studies -- or any chess position.
He also advised Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson

Kenneth Lane Thompson , commonly referred to as ken in hacker circles, is an American pioneer of computer science...

in writing programs for endgame data bases with four and five pieces. For queen and pawn against queen some results were published by Roycroft in three booklets in 1986, years ahead of full 'database' output on CD.

Literature

• Test Tube Chess, Faber and Faber Limited, 1972, ISBN 0-571-09573-9. Revision: The Chess Endgame Study, 1981, Dover.
• Queen and Pawn on a2 against Queen, Chess Endgame Consultants and Publishers, April 1986, ISBN 1-869874-00-5
• Queen and Pawn on a6 against Queen, Chess Endgame Consultants and Publishers, May 1986, ISBN 1-869874-05-6
• Queen and Pawn on b7 against Queen, Chess Endgame Consultants and Publishers, June 1986, ISBN 1-869874-10-2