Short answers, pulled from the story.
Arthur Lee Samuel (1901-1990) was an American computer scientist who coined the term "machine learning" in 1959. He is best known for creating the Samuel Checkers-playing Program, one of the world's first successful self-learning programs and an early demonstration of artificial intelligence.
Arthur Samuel coined the term "machine learning" in 1959, while working at IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York. His checkers-playing program, which began development in 1949, was a central part of this research.
Samuel's program used alpha-beta pruning to manage limited memory, a scoring function to evaluate board positions, and a minimax strategy to select moves. It also used "rote learning" to remember previously seen positions, studied professional games to refine its reward function, and played thousands of games against itself.
The public demonstration of Samuel's checkers program on the IBM 701 caused IBM's stock to increase 15 points overnight. The program ran on IBM's first commercial computer.
Samuel received the Computer Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 1987, recognizing his work in adaptive non-numerical processing. In 1990, the year of his death, he was named a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Samuel worked with Donald Knuth on the TeX project at Stanford University after retiring from IBM in 1966. He contributed to TeX's documentation and wrote "First Grade TeX: A Beginner's TeX Manual" in 1983, published as Stanford Computer Science Report STAN-CS-83-985. He was recognized as a senior member of the TeX community.