When and where was Arthur Samuel born?
Arthur Lee Samuel entered the world on the 5th of December 1901 in Emporia, Kansas. He walked away from the College of Emporia with a degree in 1923 before traveling to Massachusetts for advanced study at MIT.
Questions about Arthur Samuel (computer scientist)
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What significant computer program did Arthur Samuel create at IBM?
Samuel created a checkers-playing program that became a sensation upon its release in 1959. It stood as one of the world's first successful self-learning programs using alpha-beta pruning and rote learning mechanisms.
Where did Arthur Samuel work after leaving Bell Laboratories?
After World War II he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to initiate the ILLIAC project before his career path shifted toward software development when he arrived at IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York during 1949.
How did Arthur Samuel teach his checkers program to learn over time?
Samuel designed mechanisms allowing his program to become better over time through rote learning which remembered every position it had already seen. Later versions reevaluated the reward function based on input from professional games while playing thousands of games against itself.
When did Arthur Samuel die and what caused his death?
Complications from Parkinson's disease led to his death on the 29th of July 1990. He continued writing software past his eighty-eighth birthday and received the Computer Pioneer Award by the IEEE Computer Society in 1987.