The photo I used to accompany the earlier post about computer intelligence and the photo above are 1966 pictures of John McCarthy, the person who coined the term “Artificial Intelligence.” It was in that year the technologist organized a correspondence chess match (via telegraph) between his computer program and one in Russia. McCarthy lost the series of matches but obviously won in a larger sense. A brief passage about the competition from his Stanford obituary:

“In 1960, McCarthy authored a paper titled, ‘Programs with Common Sense,’ laying out the principles of his programming philosophy and describing ‘a system which is to evolve intelligence of human order.’

McCarthy garnered attention in 1966 by hosting a series of four simultaneous computer chess matches carried out via telegraph against rivals in Russia. The matches, played with two pieces per side, lasted several months. McCarthy lost two of the matches and drew two. ‘They clobbered us,’ recalled [Les] Earnest.

Chess and other board games, McCarthy would later say, were the ‘Drosophila of artificial intelligence,’ a reference to the scientific name for fruit flies that are similarly important in the study of genetics.”