Martin Bryant (programmer)

Martin Bryant (born 1958) is a British computer programmer known as the author of White Knight and Colossus Chess, a 1980s commercial chess-playing program, and Colossus Draughts, gold medal winner at the 2nd Computer Olympiad in 1990.

Bryant started developing his first chess program – later named White Knight – in 1976. This program won the European Microcomputer Chess Championship in 1983, and was commercially released, in two versions (Mk 11 and Mk 12) for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron in the early 1980s.White Knight featured a then-novel display of principal variation – called "Best line" – that would become commonplace in computer chess.

Bryant used White Knight as a basis for development of Colossus Chess (1983), a chess-playing program that was published for a large number of home computer platforms in the 1980s, and was later ported to Atari ST, Amiga and IBM PC as Colossus Chess X.Colossus Chess sold well and was well-received, being described by the Zzap!64 magazine in 1985 as "THE best chess implementation yet to hit the 64, and indeed possibly any home micro".

Bryant later released several versions of his Colossus chess engine conforming to the UCI standard. The latest version was released in 2008 as Colossus 2008b.

After chess, Bryant's interests turned to computer draughts. His program, Colossus Draughts, won the West of England championship in June 1990, thus becoming the first draughts program to win a human tournament. In August of the same year it won the gold medal at the 2nd Computer Olympiad, beating Chinook, a strong Canadian program, into second place.

...
Wikipedia