Definition
Samuel’s Checkers Player is the first machine learning system that received public recognition. It pioneered many important ideas in game playing and machine learning. The two main papers describing his research (Samuel 1959, 1967) became landmark papers in Artificial Intelligence. In one game, the resulting program was able to beat one of America’s best players of the time.
Description of the Learning System
Samuel’s checkers player featured a wide variety of learning techniques. First, his checkers player remembered positions that it frequently encountered during play. This simple form of rote learning allowed it to save time, and to search deeper in subsequent games whenever a stored position was encountered on the board or in some line of calculation. Next, it featured the first successful application of what is now known as Reinforcement Learningfor tuning the weights of its evaluation function. The program trained itself by playing against a stable copy of itself....
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Recommended Reading
Samuel AL (1959) Some studies in machine learning using the game of checkers. IBM J Res Develop 3(3):211–229
Samuel AL (1967) Some studies in machine learning using the game of checkers. II – recent progress. IBM J Res Develop 11(6):601–617
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this entry
Cite this entry
(2017). Samuel’s Checkers Player. In: Sammut, C., Webb, G.I. (eds) Encyclopedia of Machine Learning and Data Mining. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7687-1_740
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7687-1_740
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-7685-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7687-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering