A workshop held in 1956 at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, is usually considered the beginning of artificial intelligence. Participants included John McCarthy and Marvin Minski. Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse, who already dealt with this topic in the 1940s, are also mentioned as the founders of this discipline. For decades, machine chess was considered the highlight of artificial intelligence. It was not until 1997 that IBM's Deep Blue program was able to beat then-world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

DeepMind's artificial intelligence programme AlphaZero is now showing signs of human-like intuition and creativity, in what developers have hailed as'turning point' in history. The computer system amazed the world last year when it mastered the game of chess from scratch within just four hours, despite not being programmed how to win. But now, after a year of testing and analysis by chess grandmasters, the machine has developed a new style of play unlike anything ever seen before, suggesting the programme is now improvising like a human. Unlike the world's best chess machine - Stockfish - which calculates millions of possible outcomes as it plays, AlphaZero learns from its past successes and failures, making its moves based on, a'nebulous sense that it is all going to work out in the long run,' according to experts at DeepMind. When AlphaZero was pitted against Stockfish in 1,000 games, it lost just six, winning convincingly 155 times, and drawing the remaining bouts.

A year on from its victory over Go star Lee Sedol, Google DeepMind is preparing a "festival" of exhibition matches for its board game-playing AI, AlphaGo, to see how far it has evolved in the last 12 months. Headlining the event will be a one-on-one match against the current number one player of the ancient Asian game, 19-year-old Chinese professional Ke Jie. DeepMind has had its eye on this match since even before AlphaGo beat Lee. On the eve of his trip to Seoul in March 2016, the company's co-founder, Demis Hassabis, told the Guardian: "There's a young kid in China who's very, very strong, who might want to play us." As well as the one-on-one match with Jie, which will be played over the course of three games, AlphaGo will take part in two other games with slightly odder formats. One, "Pair Go", will see two human Go professionals play against each other, each partnered up with their own iteration of AlphaGo.

Gary Kasparov in the final game of of Technology Computer Science Computer Chess, created in a tied, six-game match last May 11. Soon thereafter, the team moved to IBM, where they have been ever since, working under wraps on Deep Blue. The $100,000 third tier of the prize was awarded at AAAI-97 to this IBM team, who built the first computer chess machine that beat a world chess champion. The members of the Deep Blue team were also honored for their achievement with the Allen Newell Research Excellence Medal, sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University. Allen Newell Medals were presented to each of the major researchers in the field whose earlier contributions ultimately led to the success of Deep Blue.

"The modern general-purpose computer can be characterized as the embodiment of a three-point philosophy: (1) There shall exist a way of computing anything computable; (2) The computer shall be so fast that it does not matter how complicated the way is; and (3) Man shall be so intelligent that he will be able to discern the way and instruct the computer." Proceedings of the 1955 Western Joint Computer Conference, Institute of Radio Engineers, New York, pp 101-108, 1955. (Also issued as RAND Technical Report P-620.)