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I am not saying search is the only reason but that search is more significant in the Elo jump than other factors. Thanks for the interesting history which in general I agree with but I should add for clarification...
In 1989 I was exposed to the [[Null Move|null move]] in [[HiarcsHIARCS|HIARCS']] first official computer tournament at the [[1st Computer Olympiad|Olympiad]] in London. [[John Hamlen]] had written his program [[Woodpusher]] as part of his M.Sc project investigating the null move exclamation and although Woodpusher did not do well in that tournament I had the good fortune to discuss null move with John and reading his project which interested me very much. John and I had many discussions on computer chess over the following months.
That Olympiad probably had an impact on you too and not only because [[Rebel]] won Gold above [[Mephisto Portorose|Mephisto X]] and [[Fidelity|Fidelity X]] for the first time but because there was a program there running quite fast (at that time in history) called [[E6P]] (so named because it could reach 6 ply full width!) running on an Acorn [[ARM2|ARM]] [[Acorn Archimedes|based machine]]. [[Jan Louwman|Jan]] was operating Rebel at the tournament as you know and I noticed Jan take a keen interest in this new machine.
