Allen Newell and Herbert Simon who used what John McCarthy calls an "approximation"[1] in 1958 wrote that
alpha-beta "appears to have been reinvented a number of times".[2] Arthur Samuel had an early version and Richards,
Hart, Levine and/or Edwards found alpha-beta independently in the United States.
[3] McCarthy proposed similar
ideas during the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 and suggested it to a group of his students including Alan Kotok at
MIT in 1961.[4] Alexander Brudno independently discovered the alpha-beta algorithm, publishing his results in
1963.[5] Donald Knuth and Ronald W. Moore refined the algorithm in 1975[6] [7] and it continued to be advanced.