Uploaded March 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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Name: Draughts (checkers)
Developer: Christopher Strachey
Year: 1952
Simulation: Not Available/ 1 players.
Platform: Ferranti Mark I


The first video game was an implementation of the board game draughts (or checkers), programmed by British teacher and physicist Christopher Strachey for the Ferranti Mark I computer. This game pitted a human operator against the computer, with the game board and the position of the pieces shown on one of the Ferranti Mark I's Williams Tube displays. The draughts program was first played in July 1952.

Strachey chose draughts as it was a middle-ground in terms of complexity between the too-simple noughts and crosses (tic tac toe) and the too complex chess (which computers wouldn't be able to play adequately until the 1960s). He originally intended to run the program on the Pilot ACE computer at the National Physical Laboratory, but when this was tried in the summer of 1951, it overwhelmed the computer's memory.

Later the same year, Strachey read about the Manchester Mark I – a significantly more capable computer – and wrote to its designer, Alan Turing, requesting an opportunity to try it out. Turing sent him the programming manual for the new computer (and its commercial version, the Ferranti Mark I), and Strachey set about rewriting his code to work with the new machine. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
More info:
alpha60.de/research/programming_enter/DavidLink_ProgrammingEnter_ComputerResurrection60_2012.pdf
rylandscollections.com/2023/06/21/a-new-view-of-the-manchester-computer


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