I knew one of the authors, Mark Wells. After he retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory he moved, temporarily, to Las Cruces, NM, to be head of the CS department at New Mexico State University, so became my boss as a student employee in the department. I don't recall his authorship of the chess program being mentioned by any of the profs or grad students (it was a very small department). When I moved to Los Alamos many years later I discovered that he lived just down the street--they'd kept their house in Los Alamos while in Las Cruces and had returned (for the skiing, he said).

The first article linked below has some details about the chess program not in the Wikipedia article.

Chess was his (serious) hobby; his research was in programming language design, specifically concerning type theory.

https://ladailypost.com/former-lanl-mathematician-computer-s...

https://ladailypost.com/obituary-mark-brimhall-wells-oct-7-2...