Brudno developed the "mathematics/machine interface" for the M-2 computer constructed in 1952 at the Krzhizhanovskii laboratory of the Institute of Energy of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Soviet Union.

Many well known results were presented and discussed at this seminar, including: Gauss–Kronrod quadrature formula, AVL trees, computer chess, Pattern recognition (M. Bongard ru:Бонгард, Михаил Моисеевич, P. Kunin and others), Method of Four Russians and others.

Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon who used what John McCarthy calls an "approximation"[5] in 1958 wrote that alpha-beta "appears to have been reinvented a number of times".

[6] Arthur Samuel had an early version and Richards, Hart, Levine and/or Edwards found alpha-beta independently in the United States.

[7] 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.