July 12, 1962: IBM Checkers Program Defeats Human Player

A computer first defeated the World Chess Champion in 1997, and the world champion in Go in 2016. There was never a famous match between a computer and the World Checkers Champion, but there was a lower-profile game that deserves its place in computing history.

On July 12, 1962, a checkers program created by IBM engineer Arthur Samuel defeated strong American player Robert Nealey in a game of checkers.

Samuel began developing his program in the early 1950s on the IBM 701. In his landmark 1959 paper, Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers, he described a system that evaluated positions using a set of features, automatically adjusted their weights, and improved its play by competing against itself thousands of times. In that paper, Samuel used the term machine learning, which was remarkably uncommon at the time.

The program’s opponent was Robert Nealey, a strong American checkers player and former Connecticut state champion. The computer’s victory attracted widespread attention and became one of the first public demonstrations that a machine could successfully compete with an experienced human in an intellectual game.

Arthur Samuel’s program used self-learning, automatic tuning of its evaluation function, and experience gained from playing its own games—approaches that would become fundamental to many artificial intelligence systems decades later.

Sources

• American Scientist — The Manifest Destiny of Artificial Intelligence
• Arthur L. Samuel — Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers (IBM Journal of Research and Development, 1959)
• Nils J. Nilsson — The Quest for Artificial Intelligence
• Jonathan Schaeffer — One Jump Ahead (chapter on Arthur Samuel)
• IBM Archives — Early Computer Games