(image credit: by Pixabay )
Before ChatGPT and self-driving cars, artificial intelligence began with a humble checkers game. Discover how a pioneering 1951 program laid the foundation for the AI-powered world we live in today.
The Surprising Origins of Artificial Intelligence
When we think of artificial intelligence today, images of futuristic robots, smart assistants like Siri or Alexa, or powerful tools like ChatGPT come to mind. But the roots of AI go back much further — all the way to the early 1950s. One of the earliest examples of AI was not a complex system designed to pass exams or generate art — it was a computer program written to play checkers.
Who Wrote the First AI Program?
The honor of creating the first AI program goes to Christopher Strachey, a British computer scientist. In 1951, Strachey developed a checkers-playing program that could run on the Ferranti Mark I, one of the world’s earliest commercial general-purpose computers. At the time, programming was still in its infancy, and computers were massive machines that took up entire rooms — yet this groundbreaking software showed early signs of machine learning.
How Did It Work?
Strachey’s program wasn’t just following a set of rigid instructions. It had the ability to evaluate board positions and make decisions based on simple strategies. More impressively, it could learn from its own mistakes. This concept — having a machine improve its performance through experience — became a cornerstone of what we now call machine learning.
Why It Matters
Though rudimentary by today’s standards, Strachey’s checkers AI marked the beginning of a new era. It demonstrated that machines could be programmed to solve problems, make decisions, and even “learn.” These are all traits we now expect from modern AI. Without this early experiment, the path to today’s generative AI, deep learning, and robotics might have looked very different.
Fun Fact: Checkers Remains a Benchmark for AI
Decades later, checkers remained a proving ground for AI development. In 2007, a program called Chinook, developed by researchers at the University of Alberta, became the first to solve the game — meaning it could never lose. This journey from the Ferranti Mark I to Chinook shows how AI evolved from simple rule-based systems to mathematically unbeatable intelligence.
