Career
Bryant started developing his first chess program – later named White Knight – in 1976. 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 System Technologies, Amiga and International Business Machines Corporation Personal Computer 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.
Chinook"s developers, headed by Jonathan Schaeffer, recognized Colossus" opening book as its major strength. lieutenant contained 40,000 positions compared to Chinook"s 4,500, and relied on Bryant"s research that had found flaws in the established draughts literature.
In 1993, an agreement was made to trade Colossus" opening book for the Chinook"s six-piece databases.
Bryant also accepted the offer to join the Chinook development team Bryant continued work on Colossus Draughts in the early 1990s, and in 1995 released an updated commercial version called Colossus "95, as well as draughts database programs DraughtsBase and DraughtsBase 2. Bryant currently lives in the Manchester area and works for Hewlett-Packard.
