Arthur Samuel

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Arthur Lee Samuel, (1901 - July 29, 1990 ) was an American computer game pioneer, who developed a Checkers program in the 50s, which appeared to be the world's first self-learning program. He already implemented a variation of alpha-beta pruning, which appeared to have been reinvented a number of times by John McCarthy, Allen Newell with Herbert Simon, Alexander Brudno and others. Samuel's program already used bitboards to represent the checkers board state. Arthur Samuel further was pioneer in machine learning, and first used the reinforcement learning technique later dubbed TDLeaf(λ), and, a few years later, supervised move adaption to tune the evaluation of his program, where a structure of stacked linear evaluation functions was trained by computing a correlation measure based on the number of times the feature rated an alternative move higher than the desired move played by an expert.

=Quotes=

=See also=
 * Alpha-Beta
 * History of Alpha-Beta


 * Bitboards
 * Checkers
 * History of Computer Chess
 * Learning
 * Reinforcement Learning
 * Temporal Difference Learning

=Selected Publications=

1959

 * Arthur Samuel (1959). Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers. IBM Journal July 1959, reprinted in David Levy (ed.) (1988). Computer Games I.

1960 ...

 * Arthur Samuel (1960). Programming Computers to Play Games. Advances in Computers, Vol. 1, pp. 165-192
 * Arthur Samuel (1967). Some Studies in Machine Learning. Using the Game of Checkers. II-Recent Progress. pdf
 * Hans Berliner, Richard Greenblatt, Jacques Pitrat, Arthur Samuel, David Slate (1977). Panel on Computer Game Playing. IJCAI 1977, pdf

1980 ....

 * Gio Wiederhold, John McCarthy, Edward Feigenbaum (1990). Memorial Resolution: Arthur L. Samuel (1901 - 1990). AI Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 3
 * John McCarthy, Edward Feigenbaum (1991). In Memoriam. Arthur L. Samuel: Pioneer in Machine Learning. ICCA Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1
 * Jonathan Schaeffer (1997, 2009). One Jump Ahead Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers, Springer, ISBN 0-387-94930-5, ISBN 978-0-387-76575-4, Didn't Samuel Solve That Game?

2000 ...

 * Pamela McCorduck (2004). Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. A. K. Peters (25th anniversary edition)

=External Links=
 * Arthur Samuel from Wikipedia
 * Arthur Samuel: Pioneer in Machine Learning by John McCarthy from Stanford Computer History Exhibits
 * Arthur L. Samuel | 1987 Computer Pioneer Award from IEEE Computer Society Awards
 * Human-Level AI is harder than it seemed in 1955 by John McCarthy
 * Samuel's Checkers Player (pdf) from Reinforcement Learning by Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto
 * Chinook - Arthur Samuel's Legacy
 * Standing on the shoulders of giants by Albert Silver, ChessBase News, September 18, 2019

=References=

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