Atlas record: https://www.aitimeline.dev/en/events/evt-0080/
Research · March 1955
Newell's chess machine
Newell described a chess program as a system that decomposes the task into goals and chooses moves by goal, rather than enumerating everything.
Why it matters
This is the move from exhaustive search to search guided by the structure of the problem, the line that led to Logic Theorist.
The talk was given about fifteen months before the Dartmouth workshop and contains what became the core of Newell and Simon's approach: limited search directed by intermediate goals. The program itself was not implemented; Newell turned to theorem proving instead.
Event record
- Event date
- March 1955
- Timeline date
- Event date
- Verification
- Sources gathered automatically · September 17, 2026
- Lines
- ID
- evt-0080
Western Joint Computer Conference, 1-3 March 1955.
Related events
Earlier
Later
- Builds on Logic Theorist 1956links to this record
Goal-directed search carried over from the chess task to theorem proving.
- Related Chess on the IBM 704, full board 1958links to this record
Newell in 1955 described a chess program as a system of goals; Bernstein in 1958 implemented a selection of «plausible moves» by features of the game. The survey by Newell, Shaw and Simon sets the two approaches side by side.
- Extends A chess program built from goals, not numbers 1958links to this record
The paper says the authors' work on chess started in 1955 and lists «The Chess Machine» among its references; they now return to chess «equipped with ideas derived from the work on logic».