The First AI Program to Master a Game Was Written in 1951 - Apparently.
In 1951, a computer program called OXO was written by Alexander Douglas, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge. OXO was a tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) game that could play itself or against a human opponent. The program used a simple decision-making algorithm to determine its moves, and it was able to defeat human players consistently. This marked one of the earliest examples of a computer program using artificial intelligence to achieve a specific goal, predating the development of more complex AI systems.