Artificial intelligence · 1956

Samuel's checkers learner

A program that improves at checkers by playing itself, and coins 'machine learning'.

Arthur Samuel's IBM checkers program was demonstrated on television in 1956 and learned its evaluation function from self-play. His 1959 paper popularised the phrase machine learning. It pioneered self-play, evaluation learning and alpha-beta style search.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 3

Dartmouth AI workshop 1956
ENIAC 1945
Game theory 1944

What it led to 3

Temporal-difference learning 1988
Deep Blue 1997
Monte Carlo tree search 2006

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Training compute of notable AI models Source: Epoch AI, Notable AI Models (CC BY 4.0)

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6