ABSTRACT
The appearance of David Gale’s board sparked a creative flurry that yielded other topological games and some game-playing machines. After the war, technology shifted from special purpose machines to general purpose computers, and scientists starting designing machines that could think. In 1952, after a conversation with Shannon-Gardner, John Nash wrote a Rand Corporation technical report in which he described Shannon’s machines, noting that Shannon’s group at Bell Labs had found a class of games based on self-dual graphs. In most cases, people would play many games against the machine without realizing the inequality of the board, even when many broad hints were dropped. Gale later invented the game of Chomp, which can be played on a chocolate bar. Shannon, known for his work on information theory, also worked on computational intelligence. In 1949 he built an electric chess computer, and in 1950 he wrote Programming a Computer for Playing Chess, which includes a search algorithm for any two-person game.
