John Walter Ryde died at Marlborough on 15 May 1961 after a short illness. Born on 15 April 1898 at Brighton, he was the only child of Walter William Ryde, an artists’ colourman, and Hannah Louise Ryde Buckland, related distantly to William Buckland, F.R.S. (1784-1856), sometime Dean of Christchurch). He had an unusually varied education starting with two years at a local Kindergarten, going on to the Junior Department of Brighton Grammar School until the death of his father in 1908; then, after his mother’s removal to South Kensington, going to St Paul’s School after a preparatory period at Colet Court. He left St Paul’s in 1913 and was sent to France for a year to learn French, where apparently he got little formal instruction and, as the youngest member of the school he attended, enjoyed much latitude and read widely to his own choice. Unknown, presumably, to the school authorities he practised revolver shooting in the grounds and at the end of his stay could shoot the pips off a playing card! He was sent to Berlin in July 1914 but the War spoiled the plan for a year’s stay in Germany and he was fortunate enough to escape internment by getting away to England on, literally, the last train out. Entering the City and Guilds College, Finsbury, with the object of reading engineering, he had the good fortune to be recognized as an embryo physicist by Professor Sylvanus P. Thompson, who advised that after the College course he should carry on his scientific education at Cambridge. However in 1916 the young Ryde volunteered for service with the Royal Engineers, and was given a short training in Monmouthshire before being posted to a searchlight station in East Anglia. He soon showed his flair for physics by working at the theory of focusing finite sources of light with parabolic mirrors, later to be the subject of a paper to the International Congress on Illumination, held in America in 1928. When posted to France, his fluent French secured him interesting liaison duties of various kinds including it is said, the unusual task of purchasing a pig from a local farmer for the Armistice Celebrations! Just before the Armistice he was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant.
Playing Card-Based RTS Games with Deep Reinforcement Learning
