Arthur Samuel

Arthur Lee Samuel (1901–1990) was an American pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence. The Samuel Checkers-playing Program appears to be the world's first self-learning program, and as such a very early demonstration of the fundamental concept of artificial intelligence (AI). Samuel was born in 1901 in Emporia, Kansas and graduated from College of Emporia in Kansas in 1923. He received a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1926, and taught for two years as instructor. In 1928, he joined Bell Laboratories, where he worked mostly on vacuum tubes, including improvements of Radar during World War II. He developed a gas-discharge transmit-receive switch (TR tube) that allowed a single antenna to...