Checkers (video game)

Checkers, also called Draughts, is a 1952 video game developed by British computer scientist Christopher Strachey. It is one of the first computer programs in the early history of video games, possibly the first game to display visuals on an electronic screen, and the first game written for a general-purpose computer. It first became operational during the summer of that year on the Ferranti Mark 1 computer at the University of Manchester. In Checkers, the player competes against a rudimentary artificial intelligence in a simulation of the board game of the same name; the game ends when all of either player's pieces have been captured or obstructed by the opponent.

Checkers began development in early 1951 when Strachey joined the National Physical Laboratory, which had just succeeded in building a prototype computer called the Pilot ACE, based on Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine. To familiarize himself with programming on this machine, Strachey wrote a game inspired by the article A Theory of Chess and Noughts and Crosses, published in 1950. He was also influenced in his choice by Charles Babbage's analytical engine and proposals for chess and checkers games. Programming errors, however, prevented it from functioning correctly, and the prototype's memory was insufficient to run the game properly. In the spring of 1952, Strachey learned that the University of Manchester owned the Ferranti Mark 1, a computer more powerful than the ACE. He then went to the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester, where he met Turing. Encouraged by him, Strachey made numerous improvements to Checkers, which by July 1952 was running at a playable speed. Later that year at a conference in Toronto, Canada, Strachey described Checkers to Arthur Samuel, prompting him to develop his own version on the IBM 701.