Programming a Computer for Playing Chess (1950) [pdf]

Thanks for posting. As an avid player, it's fascinating to read how much foresight these thinkers had in 1950. Today, programs stronger than any human can be downloaded from the app store for free and take up a relatively small amount of space. Humbling and inspiring. For anyone who enjoyed this read I recommend watching the movie "computer chess" as soon as possible!

Also refer to the movie "Computer Chess" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Chess_%28film%29

This is a work of great beauty and foresight. And does he just invent the minimax algorithm in there?

I know! According to [1] the minimax algorithm does indeed originate here. And Hamming said in that talk [2][3] that Shannon didn't do anything killer after Info Theory...

[1] - http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/the-book.html [2] - http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html [3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw

The really incredible thing to me is that I could sit down with this and write a chess engine using the method outlined here and it would work. This paper is the Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation By Machine of the computer chess world.

great article