What was the first computer program to have AI (and on what hardware did it run)?

Choose wisely! The correct answer, the explanation, and an intriguing story await. Correct Answer: Christopher Strachey's Checkers program on the Ferranti Mark I What was Comdex before it was shut down in the early 2000s? One of the earliest and most influential examples of artificial intelligence was Christopher Strachey's draughts (checkers) program, developed between 1951 and 1952. Strachey, a schoolmaster and pioneering computer scientist, initially wrote the program for Alan Turing's Pilot ACE, an early British computer. However, the Pilot ACE suffered from severe memory limitations, prompting Strachey to migrate his work to the more powerful Ferranti Mark I at the University of Manchester. The Ferranti Mark I, delivered in early 1951, was the first commercially available general-purpose computer and became a fertile ground for early AI experiments. It was built around vacuum-tube logic and used a 10-bit word architecture. For memory, it combined a small, fast Williams-Kilbur ... Read full article.