Martin Bryant

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 * Martin Bryant

Martin Bryant, a British computer scientist, and computer chess and games programmer. In the late 70s, while affiliated with the University of Manchester and after some first chess programming trials, he got reawakened when he discovered a chess program listing on the university mainframe, a CDC Cyber 72, apparently the version of Chess 3.5 which won the ACM 1971. Inspired by that listing as well as Monty Newborn's book Computer Chess, Martin wrote his own chess program in Pascal, dubbed White Knight. After graduating, he started to port White Knight to 6502 Assembly for an Apple II. He played the European MCC 1981 and soon became a professional chess and games programmer, also working for David Levy and Kevin O’Connell and their respective companies Philidor Software and Intelligent Software. In 1983, White Knight was bought by BBC for the BBC Micro, and Martin soon started with his mighty Colossus brand programs Colossus Chess, Colossus Draughts and Colossus Backgammon.

=Checkers= Colossus Draughts won the 2nd Computer Olympiad in Checkers with Chinook by Jonathan Schaeffer et al. competing as well. Colossus was well prepared, since Checkers expert Martin Bryant recognized a weak opening move by Chinook played against another program one round before - which nevertheless could not find the refutation and lost, and added the winning refutation inside Colossus' opening book. Martin Bryant later accepted the offer to trade Colossus' huge opening book for Chinook's six-piece databases and therefore helped Chinook to become The World Man-Machine Checkers Champion, and subsequently the offer to join the Chinook development team.

=Colossus Chess UCI= In 2004, Martin Bryant started to work on a completely new version of Colossus Chess conforming to the UCI protocol.

=Photos= Martin Bryant

=Publications=
 * Tony Harrington (1983). University Challenge - Martin Bryant and White Knight. Personal Computer World, August 1983, pdf hosted by Mike Watters
 * Alex Bell (1983). Chess for three gives the White Knight a winning gambit. The Micro User Magazine, December 1983
 * Martin Bryant (1984). Chess software for home computers. Computer & Video Games, January 1984, pdf hosted by Mike Watters
 * Tony Harrington (1984). Of might and men. Personal Computer News, November 1984, pdf hosted by Mike Watters
 * Jonathan Schaeffer, Rob Lake, Paul Lu, Martin Bryant (1996). Chinook: The World Man-Machine Checkers Champion. AI Magazine, Vol. 17, No. 1

=Forum Posts=
 * Interview with Martin Bryant, the Man behind Colossus by Fernando Villegas, CCC, May 18, 2002
 * isn't there a new version of colossus ? by Thorsten Czub, CCC, April 29, 2004
 * Colossus 2007d Available by Martin Bryant, CCC, September 22, 2007
 * 64-bit PGO problem? by Martin Bryant, CCC, June 27, 2008
 * Correlation Experiment Results by Martin Bryant, CCC, August 13, 2008
 * Colossus 2008a available by Martin Bryant, CCC, September 07, 2008
 * Colossus 2008b available by Martin Bryant, CCC, September 23, 2008

=External Links=
 * Colossus Home, Wayback Machine
 * Colossus - Author


 * Martin Bryant's ICGA Tournaments
 * Martin Bryant from Wikipedia
 * Chess Computers - The UK Story from Chess Computer UK by Mike Watters
 * Interview with David Levy from schach-computer wiki

=References= Up one level