ELIZA chatbot on the IBM 7094
IBM Deep Thought - Chess program on the IBM 3090
Christopher Strachey's Checkers on the Ferranti Mark I
Hearsay-II speech recognition on the Digital PDP-10
Choose wisely! The correct answer, the explanation, and an intriguing story await.
Correct Answer: Christopher Strachey's Checkers on the Ferranti Mark I

A little background

One of the earliest and most influential examples of artificial intelligence was Christopher Strachey's draughts (checkers) program, developed between 1951 and 1952. Strachey, a schoolmaster and pioneering computer scientist, initially wrote the program for Alan Turing's Pilot ACE, an early British computer. However, the Pilot ACE suffered from severe memory limitations, prompting Strachey to migrate his work to the more powerful Ferranti Mark I at the University of Manchester.

The Ferranti Mark I, delivered in early 1951, was the first commercially available general-purpose computer and became a fertile ground for early AI experiments. It was built around vacuum-tube logic and used a 10-bit word architecture.

For memory, it combined a small, fast Williams-Kilburn tube store with a larger magnetic drum backing store. The system operated with a basic clock speed of about 1 kHz, and its drum memory could store several hundred words, which was substantial for the era.

By the summer of 1952, Strachey's draughts program had advanced to the point where it could play an entire game unaided. It could make strategic moves and even celebrate victories by playing "God Save the King."

This was a landmark achievement, demonstrating that a machine could perform tasks requiring strategy and decision-making – hallmarks of artificial intelligence. The program incorporated fundamental AI principles such as state representation, game-tree search, and basic heuristics.

It's important to clarify, however, that while the draughts program embodied AI concepts, it was entirely written by Strachey himself. The idea of software that could write other software – true AI-generated code – didn't emerge until the 1960s with early program synthesis efforts. Thus, Strachey's work is best recognized as the first significant AI application rather than the first program authored by AI.

The success of Strachey's work had a profound influence on contemporaries such as Alan Turing and Dietrich Prinz, reinforcing the belief that "intelligent" behavior was achievable through software rather than requiring human-like hardware.

This pivotal moment laid the groundwork for the development of future AI systems and game-playing algorithms, including those that would eventually defeat human champions in chess and Go.

As for the other possible (wrong) answers in this trivia:

  • HEARSAY-II was a pioneering speech recognition system. Developed in the early 1970s at Carnegie Mellon, it advanced the field of natural language understanding and influenced many later AI systems. HEARSAY-II used a blackboard architecture where multiple specialized knowledge sources contributed to interpreting spoken language.

  • IBM Deep Thought, developed in the late 1980s, was one of the strongest early chess-playing computers. Running on an IBM 3090 mainframe, it could evaluate hundreds of thousands of positions per second. Deep Thought competed against top human players and laid the groundwork for IBM's later Deep Blue system, which famously defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

  • ELIZA (1964 to 1967) was an early natural language processing program designed to simulate conversation. Its most famous script, DOCTOR, mimicked a Rogerian psychotherapist by reflecting users' statements back at them. Although it ran on the IBM 7094, ELIZA was rule-based and lacked true understanding, but it captivated the public and sparked interest in conversational AI.