Mac Hack VI at a tournament
Richard Greenblatt's program played all five rounds of the Massachusetts Amateur Championship under ordinary tournament conditions.
Why it matters
The first measurement of machine play on a scale shared with humans: a rating rather than a demonstration.
The result was one draw and four losses, a rating of about 1400, the level of a strong schoolchild. Greenblatt used move-selection heuristics on a PDP-6 rather than full search. The same year the program beat Hubert Dreyfus, who had argued a machine would not play even at a novice level.