The First AI Program to Play Chess Was Written by a 23-Year-Old Student in 1951 - Apparently.
In 1951, a 23-year-old student named Alexander S. Douglas created the first artificial intelligence program to play chess. The program, called OXO (short for "noughts and crosses" in British English), was written for the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) computer. OXO was a simple chess-playing program that could play a game of chess against a human opponent, and it is considered a precursor to the development of modern AI chess programs.