Fermat's Library Some Studies In Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers annotated/explained version.

This is his seminal paper originally published in 1959 where Samuel sets out to build a program that can learn to play the game of checkers. Checkers is an extremely complex game - as a matter of fact the game has roughly 500 billion billion possible positions - that using a brute force only approach to solve it is not satisfactory. Samuel's program was based on Claude Shannon's minimax strategy to find the best move from a given current position. In this paper he describes how a machine could look ahead "by evaluating the resulting board positions much as a human player might do".