A 'Brief' History of Game AI Up To AlphaGo, Part 2

This is the second part of'A Brief History of Game AI Up to AlphaGo'. Part 1 is here and part 3 is here. In this part, we shall cover just about four decades of progress, from the first victories of computers against people at Checkers and Chess all the way up to DeepBlue's victory against humanity's then-best living Chess player. By the late 1950s, the industrious engineers at IBM were far from the only ones working on AI -- excitement for the new field filled research groups in universities from the US to the Soviet Union. One such group was made up of Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (both attendants of the Dartmouth Conference) from Carnegie Mellon University, and Cliff Shaw from RAND Corporation. They collaborated on Chess AI from 1955 to 1958, culminating in "Chess Playing Programs and the Problem of Complexity"1 which both summarized existing Chess AI research and contributed new ideas that they tested with the NSS (Newell, Shaw, and Simon) Chess program. Just as Shannon noted that master players use intuition to think selectively about moves, Newell, Shaw and Simon considered heuristics to be an important aspect of human Chess-playing.