Video Game History!

Have you ever wondered how video games got started? Ever wondered who created them or what the first video game was?

This week, Campers, we are delving a little into video game history!

Alan Turing

Today, we’re going to explore a man, who is pretty much the grandfather of video games. His name is Alan Turing, and he is credited with creating the very first bit of AI gaming code. He created the code back in 1948 for a chess game called Turochamp.

Turochamp was an experiment to merge computer science and machine learning. The object was that the more you played the computer in a game of chess, the more it would learn and the better it would become at it. Turochamp could play an entire chess game against an average player, and could calculate all of its opponents potential moves and then their responses based on its moves. Not bad for 1948 technology!!

Turochamp is the very first computer game ever created, but it wasn’t able to be finished by its creator. The reason was that its algorithms were so complex, that it went beyond what the early computers of the time could process. It wasn’t until decades later that the program was able to be executed and tested – and it did in fact work!

In fact, even before it could be tested, Turing’s Turochamp was inspiring programmers around the world, and would lead to the very first video games!

Yep, video games may not have even come onto the scene when they did (if at all) if it wasn’t for the work of Alan Turing. If you haven’t heard of him before, Turing was a pretty incredible guy! He was was an English mathematician, computer scientist, philosopher, theoretical biologist, and so much more. He helped push the limits of the processing power of computers, and his brilliance in code breaking essentially helped win WWII!

Interested in learning more about this incredible person? Check out these videos!

With all the amazing stuff he gave us – and his quite literal saving the world from Nazis – Turing’s story is also a very sad one. Even with him being a genius and a war hero, the society that he essentially saved at the time ended up treating him horribly, so badly that it caused Turing to end his own life.

Check out the video below for his story:

While that’s kind of ending on a sad note, Alan Turing is a man who should be celebrated. He is someone that we should all give a nod of thanks to every time we power on a computer, or load up our favorite game. If it wasn’t for him, none of this would have been possible!

Tomorrow, we’ll explore some of the early games that his code paved the way for!

If you’d like to continue exploring the life of Alan Turing, check out these links:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/alan-turing-creator-of-modern-computing/zhwp7nb

https://kids.britannica.com/kids/article/Alan-Turing/625453

https://kids.kiddle.co/Alan_Turing

https://www.techagekids.com/2016/06/alan-turing-computability-and-turing.html