Ryan Hayward received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in mathematics from Queen's University (Kingston) in 1981 and 1982 and his Ph.D.in computer science from McGill University in 1987. His doctoral thesis, Two Classes of Perfect Graphs, was supervised by Vasek Chvatal. From 1986 through 1989 he was assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University, after which he held an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at the Institute for Discrete Mathematics in Bonn for 1989-90. From 1990 through 1992 he was assistant professor in the Department of Computing Science at Queen's University. From 1992 he was assistant and then associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Lethbridge. In 1999 he joined the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, where he was promoted to professor in 2004. He has supervised 13 graduate and 29 undergraduate students, some of whom later became university professors. His research interests include algorithms for two-player games. For example, together with Martin Mueller, his doctoral student Chao Gao is investigating AlphaZero-style learning techniques for the game of Hex. His research group (including at times Yngvi Bjornsson, Michael Johanson, Broderick Arneson, Philip Henderson, Jakub Pawlewicz, and Aja Huang --- later lead programmer of AlphaGo) has built the world's strongest computer Hex player, and has solved two 10x10 Hex opening moves and all smaller-board opening moves. With Bjarne Toft, he wrote Hex, the full story, published by Taylor-Francis in 2019. Recently he developed Games, Puzzles, Algorithms, a university course that introduces algorithms for solving puzzles or playing games. He lives in Edmonton where he commutes year-round by recumbent bike.

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