My name is Andrew Fan. I was born in Hong Kong but moved to England when I was 11. I went back to Hong Kong in 1995 after accepting an invitation from a friend. I was working for IBM at that time.
In Hong Kong I worked for 6 years at Motorola, then joined a French I.S. company (which is worse company I had ever worked for). I am now unemployed after a disagreement with the bad tempered boss. Right now I am back in England.
I started my chess engine programming way back in the days when the ZX Spectrum (Timex Sinclair 2000?) was a big hit. The first chess engine I completed plays Chinese Chess using a two ply search. I did not know much about any search techniques back then but the program was fun to watch - it has a graphical board! I think I still have it on a microdrive (not the IBM ones) cartridge somewhere. During that I had a job interview with Intelligent Software (I.S.) and met with Mr. David Levy who needed someone to work on a chess program - he gave me a book (unsigned) called "Computer Gamesmanship" - obviously I had a lot to learn. A few months later, I learned that I.S. was no longer with us.
During my study at University, I took the time to write another Chinese Chess engine, this time on the Commodore Amiga A500. Being a speed freak, I wrote the whole program in assembly language. For those Windows programmers out there, the A500 is so much easier to program because the OS functions are well documented and it has a much more efficient operating system - it doesn't need hundreds of MHz and tones of RAM in order to run the GUI smoothly. Window's attempt at speech makes me laugh - just hear an Amiga talk.