Arthur Lee Samuel (December 5, 1901 – July 29, 1990)[3] was an American pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence.
In 1928, he joined Bell Laboratories, where he worked mostly on vacuum tubes, including improvements of radar during World War II.
[7] After the war he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign to become a Professor of Electrical Engineering, where he initiated the ILLIAC project, but left before its first computer was complete.
[5] Samuel is most known within the AI community for his groundbreaking work in computer checkers in 1959, and seminal research on machine learning, beginning in 1949.
[11] He believed teaching computers to play games was very fruitful for developing tactics appropriate to general problems, and he chose checkers as it is relatively simple though has a depth of strategy.
[12] Instead of searching each path until it came to the game's conclusion, Samuel developed a scoring function based on the position of the board at any given time.
With all of this work, Samuel's program reached a respectable amateur status and was the first to play any board game at this high a level.