MARTIN POIROUX
Software designed and shipped end to end: chess engines, online games, small web services. Alongside, music, cooking and chess, with the same curiosity.
ABOUT
Software engineer in Toulouse at Setics, publisher of a fibre-network design product of around five hundred thousand lines. Day-to-day development and de facto technical responsibility for the product: architecture, code review, customer support.
In parallel, personal projects carried end to end: chess engines, online games, small web services. A practice that predates the job: first brick breaker in 2010, first chess program in 2019.
The common thread: fields with simple rules, a lot left to explore, and progress that comes from analysing one’s own mistakes. Chess, played seriously since 2020, musical composition, since 2009, and software engineering all work that way.
Beyond that: science, space, physics and geography since childhood, anything involving numbers, and more recently politics and philosophy.
What keeps it going: learning by making things, and enjoying it.
MUSIC
Compositions since 2009. A few pieces, by period: the score scrolls with the sound.
The engraved score of a piece, scrolling slowly from left to right.
CHESS
Find the move that decides the game.
The game stops on the position by itself; the slider takes you anywhere else.
The e3 pawn has a single defender: the c3 queen, along the third rank. What if that rank were cut?
Why it wins
A full rook sacrifice, on a quiet move. The rook slips between the c3 queen and the e3 pawn: the defence is cut, Qxe3 becomes possible, and behind it comes a mate on f2 that nothing stops.
The bishop takes, but the third rank is cut: the black queen lands on e3 and threatens Qf2#. Nothing parries both threats. This is the game.
The queen recaptures on d3, but the f5 bishop picks her up. After Bxd3 Qxe3, Black has won the queen for a rook, and the attack goes on.
The best defence ignores the rook. But the d3 rook attacks the queen on c3: Rxc3, and Black is a queen up.
- 1. h3
- 1… d5
- 2. a3
- 2… e5
- 3. e3
- 3… Bd6
- 4. c4
- 4… Nf6
- 5. d4
- 5… exd4
- 6. Qxd4
- 6… Nc6
- 7. Qd1
- 7… O-O
- 8. cxd5
- 8… Nxd5
- 9. Nf3
- 9… Re8
- 10. Be2
- 10… Nxe3
- 11. Bxe3
- 11… Rxe3
- 12. fxe3
- 12… Bg3+
- 13. Kf1
- 13… Qe7
- 14. Qd3
- 14… Bf5
- 15. Qc3
- 15… Rd8
- 16. Nbd2
- 16… Rd3
- 17. Bxd3
- 17… Qxe3
- 18. Ne4
- 18… Bxe4
- 19. Qd2
- 19… Bxd3+
- 20. Qxd3
- 20… Qf2#
BLITZVOLLEY
A human against a neural network trained by reinforcement learning: a real match, recorded in the game and replayed here on a loop, point by point, with its spin and special moves.
PlayLooping animation of a full match between a human and a neural-network bot, point by point, with the score.
BACKGROUND
2023 →
Software engineer, Setics
Toulouse
Fibre-network design software, over five hundred thousand lines of .NET, deployed at telecom operators. Day-to-day development and de facto technical lead.
2023
Final-year internship
Cologne, Allemagne
Six months of development abroad.
2020-2023
ENSIIE, engineering degree
Évry
JIN major: Digital Interaction and Video Games. An engineering degree steered towards games and interaction as soon as the curriculum allowed.
2022
Silvaco internship
Montbonnot
Three months on integrated-circuit netlist reduction and the simulations around it, with the Python and XML tooling of the pre-release test framework. The one place in this path where the circuit was silicon.
2021
BSc in Mathematics
Évry · Paris-Saclay
A double degree run alongside the engineering school. Useful groundwork, later on, for tree search and rating systems.
2018-2020
Classes préparatoires MPSI / MP
Lycée Berthollet, Annecy
Two years of mathematics and physics in preparatory classes, MPSI then MP.
2018
French science baccalauréat
Mathematics specialism.
2009-2016
Before the code
Flip books and stop-motion animation, GameMaker then Game Develop between 2010 and 2012, and the first real code in 2016, on a calculator and in Python.
PROJECTS
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CONTACT
E-mail is the simplest way.