Talk:Arthur Samuel (computer scientist)

Early comments

Fascinating potential for this bio... perhaps split Samuel's Checkers playing program into its own page? MDSNYDER 05:14, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

I would suppose no, since four years later there has been not much interest. W Nowicki (talk)

"However, his method of learning through games continued, both in continued work on checkers (which was completely solved in 2007 by a computer which explored all relevant positions) and in other games like chess and go." => There is nothing to find for this...

Should be removed then. W Nowicki (talk) 18:55, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

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First Self-Learning Program?

Hello Editors

Is it true to say that Samuel wrote the "first self-learning program"? My understanding is that that's not the case: Christopher Strachey appears to have written a similar program for the same game, but referred to by its British name Draughts, some eight years earlier. He is therefore also credited by some sources as having written the first AI program. In fact his own Wikipedia page says: "The draughts program ran for the first time on 30 July 1951 at NPL. When Strachey heard about the Manchester Mark 1, which had a much bigger memory, he asked his former fellow-student Alan Turing for the manual and transcribed his program into the operation codes of that machine by around October 1951. The program could 'play a complete game of Draughts at a reasonable speed'."

Encylopaedia Brittanica similarly states: "The earliest successful AI program was written in 1951 by Christopher Strachey, later director of the Programming Research Group at the University of Oxford. Strachey’s checkers (draughts) program ran on the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester, England. By the summer of 1952 this program could play a complete game of checkers at a reasonable speed."

I've therefore tentatively amended the wording in the article, but would be happy to hear if anyone has sound reasons why this edit should not happen.

Thanks Sogngion (talk) 11:28, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

Merely a "respectable amateur" in the 1970s?

The article claims that by the mid-1970s, the program reached the level of a respectable amateur, but I am currently reading Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennet and it claims on page 209 (in a footnote) that in 1962 it beat "checkers champion" Robert Nealey. Googling this event finds various sources telling approximately the same story. Are we wildly wrong about the skill level the program reached? I'll try to find time to investigate... ExplodingCabbage (talk) 12:41, 23 October 2024 (UTC)