Robert Wright
In July 1979, Italy's Luigi Villa, the world backgammon champion, took on a robot in a $5,000 winner-take-all match in Monte Carlo. The robot was linked by satellite to Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University, where a Digital Equipment Corpora- tion PDP-10 computer, animated by a program called BKG 9.8, mulled things over. Villa was a 2 to 1 favorite; no machine had ever beaten a world champion in a board or card game.
But BKG 9.8 beat the odds. It won four of five games and, through...