Not exactly a household name, but as [IEEE Spectrum] points out, he invented a chess automaton in 1920 that would foreshadow the next century’s obsession with computers playing chess.

People have been interested in chess-playing computers before there were any chess-playing computers. In a 1950 paper, [Claude Shannon] defined two major chess-playing strategies. Apparently ...

Hassabis — who later went on to invent AlphaZero, an AI system that taught itself to master chess after learning it from scratch and can now eclipse the world's best players — was first introduced to ...

the most powerful chess computer of its day. Today, it seems obvious Kasparov should have lost. A computer's ability to calculate moves in a game by "brute force" is infinitely greater than a human's.

One reply is: First, can a machine be made to play a good game of chess? How a computer was programmed so that it could defeat an inexperienced human opponent ...

After interacting with chess computers, Hassabis went on to experiment with AI programming at home. Demis Hassabis's first love wasn't AI — it was chess. Decades before the Google DeepMind CEO ...

IBM's Deep Blue system achieved its first victory over a world chess champion on February 10, 1996, when it won the first game of a six-game match against Garry Kasparov. Despite this initial loss ...