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The First Robot to Play Chess Was Built in the 1960s

In 1966, a team of computer scientists at Stanford Research Institute created a robot called the "Logical Theorist," later renamed MAC (Machine Ablity to Play), that could play chess. The robot used a tree-search algorithm to evaluate moves and could defeat even the strongest human players. MAC was able to analyze an average of 60,000 positions per second and was considered one of the first successful AI applications in the field of computer science.