Arthur Samuel
| Arthur Lee Samuel | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 5, 1901 Emporia, Kansas |
| Died | July 29, 1990 (aged 88) Stanford, California |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Fields | Computer Science |
| Institutions |
Bell Laboratories (1928) University of Illinois (1946) IBM Poughkeepsie Laboratory (1949) Stanford University (1966) |
| Alma mater |
MIT (Master 1926) College of Emporia (1923) |
| Known for | Samuel Checkers-playing Program Alpha–beta pruning (an early implementation) Pioneer in Machine Learning TeX project (with Donald Knuth) |
| Notable awards | Computer Pioneer Award (1987) |
Arthur Lee Samuel (December 5, 1901 – July 29, 1990) was an American pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence. He coined the term "machine learning" in 1959. The Samuel Checkers-playing Program appears to be the world's first self-learning program, and as such a very early demonstration of the fundamental concept of artificial intelligence (AI). He was also a senior member in TeX community who devoted much time giving personal attention to the needs of users and wrote an early TeX manual in 1983.
Samuel was born on December 5, 1901 in Emporia, Kansas and graduated from College of Emporia in Kansas in 1923. He received a master's degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1926, and taught for two years as instructor. In 1928, he joined Bell Laboratories, where he worked mostly on vacuum tubes, including improvements of Radar during World War II. He developed a gas-discharge transmit-receive switch (TR tube) that allowed a single antenna to be used for both transmitting and receiving. After the war he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he initiated the ILLIAC project, but left before its first computer was complete. Samuel went to IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1949, where he would conceive and carry out his most successful work. He is credited with one of the first software hash tables, and influencing early research in using transistors for computers at IBM. At IBM he made the first checkers program on IBM's first commercial computer, the IBM 701. The program was a sensational demonstration of the advances in both hardware and skilled programming and caused IBM's stock to increase 15 points overnight. His pioneering non-numerical programming helped shaped the instruction set of processors, as he was one of the first to work with computers on projects other than computation. He was known for writing articles that made complex subjects easy to understand. He was chosen to write an introduction to one of the earliest journals devoted to computing in 1953.
...
Wikipedia