Leonardo Torres y Quevedo’s fascinating Chess Automata, via History of Computers Well crafted blog entry authored by Professor Herbert Bruderer at the Communication of the ACM blog, detailing the true start of Artificial Intelligence in 1912. 'If one takes chess as a yardstick for artificial intelligence, however, this branch of research begins much earlier, at the latest in 1912 with the chess automaton of the Spaniard Leonardo Torres Quevedo (cf. Fig. 1). In the chess playing Turk (1769) of Wolfgang von Kempelen, a human player was hidden." - via Herbert Bruderer, retired lecturer of Didactics in Computer Science at ETH Zürich Reportedly, Professor. Bruderer is now retired from his lecturer role in Didactics of Computer Science at ETH Zürich, and recently, he has fulfilled the role of Historian of Technology.

Main contributor of the repo here- shameless plug but some might find it useful. I wrote up a pretty simple version of Alpha Zero that works with any framework (PyTorch, Tensorflow, Keras) and any game (currently Othello, Gobang, TicTacToe, Connect4). Certainly not written to scale to large games, but hopefully clean code that can be fun to hack around with for smaller projects. Also a tutorial that goes with it here: http://web.stanford.edu/