In the Beginning of AI, There Were Games

Abstract

The first working digital computers were developed in the late 1940s or early 1950s, depending on your exact definition of computer, and they were immediately used to play games. In fact, in at least one instance, a program for playing a game was written and executed by hand, using pen and paper because a sufficiently powerful computer to run the program had not been built yet. The eager inventor (and player) was none other than Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of computer science and artificial intelligence. The year was 1948. The game was Chess (figure 1.1). Turing acted as the computer (computing all the moves by hand) when using this algorithm to play against a good friend. 1