Computer Chess

The early history of mechanical game playing was numerous frauds. The most notorious of these was Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen's. "The Turk", a supposed chess playing automation that defeated napoleon before being exposed as a magician's trick 1846, Charles Babbage appears to have contributed the first serious discussion of the feasibility of computer chess and checkers. He also designed, but did not build, a special purpose machine for playing tic-tac-toe. The first game plying machine was built around 1890 by the Spanish engineer Leonrdo Torres y Quevedo. It specialized in the “KRK" chess endgame, guaranteeing a win with king and rook from any position.

In 1951, Alan Turing wrote the first computer program capable of playing a full game of chess. But Turing's program never atually ran on a computer; it was tested by hand simulation against a very weak human player, who defeated it. Meanwhile D.G. Prinz had written and actually run a program that solved chess problem although it did not play a full game. Alex Bernstein wrote the first program to play a full game of standard chess.
John McCarthy conceived the idea of alpha beta search in 1956, although he did not publish it. The NSS chess program used a simplified version of alpha beta; it was the first chess program to do so. According to Nilsson, Arthur Samuel's checkers program also used alpha beta, although Samuel did not mention it in the published reports on the system. Papers describing alpha beta were published in the early 1960s. An implementation of full alpha beta is described by Sladge and Dixon in a program for playing the game of Kalah. Alpha beta was also used by the "Kotok McCarthy" chess program written by a student of John McCarthy. Knuth and Moore provide a history analysis of alpha beta with random successor ordering showed an asymptotic complexity, which seemed rather dismal because the effective branching factor is not much less than b itself. They then realized that the asymptotic formula is accurate. Pearl shows alpha beta to be asymptotically optimal among all fixed depth game tree search algorithms.

Birth of Artificial Intelligence

Princeton was home another influential figure in AI, John McCarthy. After graduation, McCarthy moved to Darmouth College, which was to become the official birthplace of the field. McCarthy convinced Minsky, Calude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester to help him bring together U.S. researchers interested in automata theory, neural nets, and the study of intelligence. They organized a two month workshop at Dartmouth in the summer of1956. There were 10 attendees in all, including Trenchard More from Princeton, Arthur Samuel from IBM and Ray Solomonoff and Oliver Selfridge from MIT.
Two researchers from Carnegie Tech, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon rather stole the show. Although the others had ideas and in some cases programs for particular applications such as checkers, Newell and Simon already had a reasoning program, the Logic Theorist about which Simon claimed, "We have invented a computer program capable of thinking non-numerically and thereby solved the venerable mind body problem". Soon after the workshop, the Principia Mathematica, Russell was reportedly delighted when Simon showed him that the program had come up with a proof for one theorem that was shorter than the one in principal. The editors of the Journal of Symbolic Logic were less impressed; they rejected a paper coauthored by Newell, Simon and Logic Theorist.
The Dartmouth workshop did not lead breakthroughs, but it did introduce all the major figures to each other. For the next 20 years, the field would be dominated by these people and their students and colleagues at MIT, CMU, Stanford and IBM. Perhaps the longest lasting thing to come out of the workshop was an agreement to adopt McCarthy's new name for the field ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

Evolution of Human Psychology

How do humans and animals think and act?
The origins of scientific psychology are usually traced to the work of the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and his student Wilhelm Wundt Helmholtz applied the scientific method to the study human vision, and his Handbook of Physiological Optics is even now described as "the single most important treatise on the physics and physiology of human vision". In 1879, Wundt opened the first laboratory of experimental psychology at the University of Leipzig. Wundt inside on carefully controlled experimental in which his workers would perform a perceptual or associative task while introspecting on their thought processes. The careful controls went a long way toward masking psychology a science, but the subject nature of the data made it unlikely that an experimenter would ever disconfirm his or her own theories.
Biologists studying animal behavior, on the other hand, lacked introspective data and developed an objective methodology, as described by H.S. Jennings in his influential work Behavior of the Lower Organisms. Applying this viewpoint to humans, the behaviorism movement, led by John Watson, rejected any theory involving mental processes on the grounds that introspection could not provide reliable evidence. Behaviorists insisted on studying only objective measures of the percepts given to an animal and its resulting actions. Mental contracts such as knowledge, beliefs, and goal and reasoning steps were dismissed as unscientific "folk psychology".
Behaviorism discovered a lot about rats and pigeons, but had less success at understanding humans. Nevertheless, it exerted a strong hold on psychology from about 1920 to 1960.

NeroScience

How do brain process information?
Neuroscience is the study of the nervous system, particularly the brain. The exact way in which the brain enables thought is one of the great mysteries of science. It has been appreciated for thousands of years that the brain is somehow involved in thought, because of the evidence that strong blows to the head can lead to mental incapacitation. It has also long been known that human brains are somehow different; in about 335 B.C. Aristotle wrote, "Of all the animals, man has the largest brain in proposition to his size". Still, it was not until the middle of the 18th century that the brain was widely recognized as the seat of consciousness. Before then, candidate location included the heart, the spleen, and the pineal gland.
Paul Broca's study of aphasia in brain damaged patients in 1861 reinvigorated the field and persuaded the medical establishment of the existence of localized areas of brain responsible for specific cognitive functions. In particular, he showed that speech production was localized to a portion of the left hemisphere now called Broca's area. By that time, it was known that the brain consisted of nerve cells or neurons, but it was not until 1873 that camillo golgi developed a staining technique allowing the observation of individual neurons in the brain. This technique was used by Santiago Ramon y cajal in his pioneering studies of the brain neuronal structures.