A 1959 Checkers Program Is Still the Blueprint for Everything This Week

Arthur Samuel coined 'machine learning' with a self-playing checkers program on IBM hardware — a reminder that today's self-improving agents are a 67-year-old idea finally finding its compute.

A bit of historical grounding, courtesy of @mathemetica: Arthur Samuel coined the term "machine learning" in 1959 with a checkers program that improved by playing against itself on IBM computers. The lineage from that program to this week's headlines is more direct than it might appear.

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