Introduction
Samuel's checkers program demonstrates how a machine can improve its performance through learning without a programmer specifying every strategy step by step. The master situates this shift from explicit rules toward learning from experience within the longer technical history of data-driven visual systems and contemporary generative models.
View full image ↗Arthur Samuel at a computer console with a checkers board, from IBM’s historical account. The source does not separately date this photograph.
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Source · The games that helped AI evolve | IBM ↗RESEARCH ACCOUNT
A learning machine changes its judgements through play.
ANTI-AI ARCHIVE · Revised 2026-10-02
The game as an experimental environment
Samuel investigates machine learning through checkers. IBM’s project history describes a program improving its evaluations from play and acquiring experience through games between machines. A bounded board, rules and outcomes create a tractable experimental setting. This differs from open-ended aesthetic judgement, so winning a game is not a universal measure of creativity.
Section sources: The games that helped AI evolve
The cultural implications of evaluation
Generative art also involves choosing which outcomes to develop. Samuel offers a comparison: what does improvement mean when an objective is explicit? In making art, the artist’s choices, audience response and institutional recognition may diverge. There is no single objective that corresponds exactly to winning or losing a game.
Section sources: The games that helped AI evolve
Sources for this account
IBM’s institutional history of Samuel’s checkers program read; not a reproduction of all experiments in the 1959 paper.
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Continue with a comparative question
Compare the methods, forms of control or presentation contexts of this entry and Boids.
Compare the methods, forms of control or presentation contexts of this entry and Evolving Virtual Creatures.
Dates & version record
Date displayed for this node: 1959 · Historical date recorded for the source: 1959
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Original sources & further reading
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Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers
https://doi.org/10.1147/rd.33.0210
Current cited URL
Provenance, translation & verification
Timeline entry #012 · Historical node
Research materials & supplement references · 1
AI Art Genealogy Research Master · p. 6 · 010
Date as recorded: 1959
Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers ↗
Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers
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Cite this node
ANTI-AI ARCHIVE. Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers. Art-history node #012. https://salondesrefuses.cn/en/art-history/010
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