Artificial Intelligence 134 (2002) 1–7 Games, computers, and artificial intelligence Jonathan Schaeffer a,* , H. Jaap van den Herik b a Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6G 2E8 b Department of Computer Science, Universiteit Maastricht, PO Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, Netherlands 1. Introduction In 1950, Claude Shannon published his seminal paper on computer chess [23]. It was the dawn of the computer age; ENIAC was only a few years old, and visionary people like Shannon and Alan Turing could see the tremendous potential for the technology. Many computers in that era were used for military applications, typically ballistic calculations for missiles. In contrast, games seemed to be a natural application for computers, and one that an average person could relate to. A desire to use computers for applications that would attract public attention motivated Arthur Samuel to begin his 25-year quest to build a strong checkers-playing program [18,20]. The first working checkers program appeared in 1952 [27], and chess programs followed shortly thereafter [10]. The early efforts of Shannon, Samuel, Turing, Allan Newell, Herbert Simon, and others generated considerable interest in researching computer performance at games. Developing game-playing programs became a major research area in the fledgling field of artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, building a world-championship-caliber chess program was one of the original “grand challenge” applications for AI. At the time, few realized the difficulty of creating programs that exhibited human-level “intelligence”, and the early days of AI were plagued by over-optimistic predictions [25]. In the 1970s and 1980s, computer-games research concentrated on chess and the so- called brute-force approach. The success of the Northwestern University chess program (the CHESS series of programs) [26] showed there was a strong correlation between search speed and chess-program performance. This was later quantified by Ken Thompson [29]. The consequence was a prolonged period of games-development activity largely devoted to building faster search engines, at the expense of doing mainstream research. The importance of developing a high-performance chess program seemed to fade. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: jonathan@cs.ualberta.ca (J. Schaeffer), herik@cs.unimaas.nl (H.J. van den Herik). 0004-3702/01/$ – see front matter  2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII:S0004-3702(01)00165-5