was occasionally able to beat an opponent with little experience (qtd. in Hogan 103). In the field of checkers, Arthur Samuel developed Checkers Player as a fund-raising effort for IBM. Although Samuel admitted that he didn't particularly enjoy checkers, his program won the Connecticut state championship before being beaten by Paaslow, the program developed at Duke University that would eventually beat the world champion (Hogan 102). Also in 1956, Logic Theorist was created by Allen Newell, J.P. Shaw, and Herbert Simon. The program used a recursive search technique to find proofs for mathematical propositions, and was able to come up with several completely original proofs of some of the theorems in Principia Mathematica, a seminal book of mathematics. In the following year, Newell, Shaw, and Simon broadened their approach and attempted to create a program that would accomplish the same sorts of tasks as Logic Theorist in the realm of the real world. The result, the General Problem Solver, proved unable to solve any but the simplest problems (Kurzweil 199). The problems of General Problem Solver, and of many other attempts to increase the practical ability of artificial intelligence, will be discussed in the next section. Artificial intelligence became big business in the 1960s and 1070s as development trends emphasized specialization over generalization. Programmers realized that imparting all the information a program would need to function acceptably in a real world situation was far beyond the scope of their ability, but that it was relatively easy to encode large amounts of knowledge about one specific discipline. Programs that used this method became known as expert systems, and were particularly useful in the fields of medicine and technical support. Expert systems used books of rules programmed by human experts in the subject to ask and answer simple questions in an effort to locate the cause of any given problem and p...
