Around 1957 IBM programmers led bfy American mathematician, chess player, and computer chess pioneer
Alex Bernstein, including
Michael de V. Roberts,
Timothy Arbuckle and
Martin Belsky, developed
The Bernstein Chess Program, the first complete chess program, on an
IBM 704 computer. The program was effective enough to defeat an inexperienced human opponent. Bernstein's program employed the
Type B Strategy proposed by Claude Shannon in his 1950 paper,
Programming a Computer for Playing Chess.
Bernstein and Roberts published a semi-popular account of their research as "Computer v. Chess-Player,"
Scientific American, June, 1958, 96-105. They concluded that article stating “there are some glimmerings of ideas about how to program a machine to avoid repeating its mistakes, and some day – not overnight – we may have machines which will improve their game as they gain experience in play against their human opponents.”
Jeremy Norman’s