Claude Shannon’s paper Programming a computer to play chess from 1950. Good stuff from the history of computer science.

[tags]Claude Shannon, Chess[/tags]

Addendum: A terrific collection of computer chess links.

Addendum²: An equally famous paper was Arthur Samuel’s 1959 publication on writing a Checkers program. Unlike Shannon’s work, Samuel was interested in creating a checkers program which learned how to play the game automatically. While it was never really very strong, Samuel’s work was highly influential in the field of machine learning.