Brian Sheppard

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Brian Sheppard, an American mathematician, computer scientist and computer games programmer, including the games of chess, Othello, and most notably Scrabble, where he is author of the commercial program Maven . Maven applies various search algorithms for various game stages, a probability-weighted search, Monte-Carlo Tree Search and B* for the endgame analysis. Brian Sheppard holds a BA in mathematics from Harvard University in 1984, and a Ph.D. from Maastricht University under supervision of Jaap van den Herik and Jonathan Schaeffer in 2002. His Ph.D. thesis Towards Perfect Play of Scrabble received the ChessBase Best-Publication Award. Brian Sheppard started writing his first chess program in 1986, which has taken him 9 years and 3 complete move generators to make a chess engine with championship-caliber speed. More recently, he contributes to the Stockfish project.

=Selected Publications=

1996

 * Brian Sheppard (1996). Deep Blue vs. Kasparov - Betting on the Human. Computer Chess Reports, Vol. 5, No. 3+4, pp. 41
 * Brian Sheppard (1996). A Professional Programmer. Computer Chess Reports, Vol. 5, No. 3+4, pp. 117

2000 ...

 * Brian Sheppard (2002). Towards Perfect Play of Scrabble. Ph.D. thesis, Maastricht University
 * Brian Sheppard (2002). World-championship-caliber Scrabble. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 134, No. 1-2
 * Brian Sheppard (2002). An Overview of Computer Play of Scrabble. Invited Lecture, 7th Computer Olympiad Workshop
 * Brian Sheppard (2003). Endgame Play in Scrabble. ICGA Journal, Vol. 26, No. 3
 * Brian Sheppard (2004). Efficient Control of Selective Simulations. CG 2004
 * Brian Sheppard (2004). Efficient Control of Selective Simulations. ICGA Journal, Vol. 27, No. 2

=Forum Posts=

1995 ...

 * Re: MVV/LVA vs SEE move ordering - more test results by Brian Sheppard, rgcc, August 27, 1995 » MVV/LVA, SEE
 * Re: Horizon Effects in modern chess programs? by Brian Sheppard, rgcc, September 10, 1995 » Horizon Effect
 * Re: Unusual killer heuristic behavior by Brian Sheppard, rgcc, September 13, 1995 » Killer Heuristic
 * Re: Deep Blue's forehand by Brian Sheppard, rgcm, February 26, 1996 » Deep Blue

2010 ...

 * Re: win rate bias and CLOP by Brian Sheppard, Computer-go Archives, January 03, 2012 » CLOP
 * Proposal to clarify improving/inCheck/last-in-check by Brian Sheppard, Fishtest, June 02, 2017
 * Significance of resignation in AGZ by Brian Sheppard, Computer-go Archives, December 01, 2017
 * Re: Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm by Brian Sheppard, Computer-go Archives, December 06, 2017 » AlphaZero
 * Re: Discussion for optimizing methodology by Brian Sheppard, Fishtest, October 23, 2018
 * Re: Perceptron by Brian Sheppard, Fishtest, March 02, 2019 » LMR

=External Links=
 * Brian Sheppard | LinkedIn
 * Brian Sheppard talks about Maven
 * SapphireBrand · GitHub

=References= Up one level