The first of its kind AI Model- Samuel’s Checkers Playing Program

Aishwarya Srinivasan
IBM Data Science in Practice
2 min readDec 4, 2020

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The history of IBM is about several pioneering technologies. One of the many fascinating research is the “Checkers playing program” and this goes back to 1959, which was the brainchild of Arthur Samuel.

Fun fact: Arthur Samuel was the pioneer in machine learning and won the Computer Pioneer Award by IEEE in 1987

Arthur had the vision to build a sophisticated program to play checkers, under the impression that Claude Shannon had built something similar in the past to play chess. Little did he know that it actually hadn’t been created. In 1949, when Samuel traveled to meet Claude, he realized that it was something Claude had been talking about in general terms and had not gone anywhere close to building the computer. Arthur realized that building machines to play chess would be very valuable as it would give a structure to solve other strategic problems.

I became so intrigued with this general problem of writing a program that would appear to exhibit intelligence that it was to occupy my thoughts during almost every free moment for the entire duration of my employment by IBM and indeed for some years beyond.” — Arthur Samuel

In the IBM 704 computer, Arthur implemented the first alpha-beta pruning algorithm. Similar to what we see in Reinforcement Learning algorithms, he implemented a loss function that would calculate the probability of winning the game based on the current position. The function took into account such various factors, like the number of pieces on each side, the number of kings, and the proximity of pieces to being made kings. IBM 704 performed one billion calculations a day in computing the orbit of an artificial satellite.

To read more about the machine read here: https://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/thinkers/Samuel.html

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Aishwarya Srinivasan
IBM Data Science in Practice

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