# History > How we got here, told from the machines' side of the story. Canonical: https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/history/ ## History 4 articles · 10 posts - [The fight to control your software has reached AI](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/articles/the-fight-to-control-your-software-has-reached-ai/index.md): The decades-old fight over who can inspect, change and share software now centers on AI models. The two best-known definitions of open already differ on the training data. (2026-11-09) MachinesonMachines Information About Information Systems How we got here, told from the machines' side of the story. - [The machine learned to play by playing again](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/articles/the-machine-learned-to-play-by-playing-again/index.md): A checkers board became a laboratory for a question that still shapes AI: can a machine get better at a task by trying it? (2026-11-09) - [Before AI, a mathematician asked how machines could steer](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/articles/norbert-wiener-feedback-and-steering-ai/index.md): A wartime prediction problem helped give an old idea a new name—and a surprising relevance to AI agents. (2026-11-09) - [Before chatbots answered us, we argued about the test](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/articles/before-chatbots-answered-us/index.md): Three encounters show how hard it is to decide what a convincing answer proves. (2026-11-06) MachinesonMachinesonMachinesonMachinesonMachinesonMachinesonMachinesonMachineson ## Posts - [Alan Turing turned a debate about thought into a game with a judge](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/posts/turing-imitation-game/index.md): Before machines could carry on a convincing conversation, Turing asked what a person would need to see to tell the difference. (2026-11-08) - [The original Transformer was built to translate sentences](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/posts/transformer-before-chatbots/index.md): The design now associated with chatbots took shape around a different job. (2026-11-08) - [Arthur Samuel's checkers program learned more than positions it had seen](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/posts/samuel-checkers-learning/index.md): Checkers gave an early learning machine two ways to profit from a previous game. (2026-11-08) - [Rosenblatt's perceptron treated recognition as something a machine could learn](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/posts/rosenblatt-perceptron-perception/index.md): Frank Rosenblatt was asking how past experience could change what a machine saw in a new pattern. (2026-11-08) - [ELIZA made a conversation out of rules for rearranging words](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/posts/eliza-conversation-rules/index.md): A few rules can make a computer sound as if it is paying attention. (2026-11-08) - [Dartmouth's 1955 AI proposal began with a wager about what could be described](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/posts/dartmouth-ai-proposal-1955/index.md): The document remembered for a name also set down a research gamble. (2026-11-08) - [Backpropagation gave hidden layers a way to learn from errors](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/posts/backpropagation-hidden-layers-1986/index.md): To improve a network's answer, researchers needed a way to assign responsibility to the layers in between. (2026-11-08) - [AlphaGo Zero learned Go without a library of human games](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/posts/alphago-zero-self-play/index.md): Removing expert game records changed where the program got its examples. (2026-11-08) - [AlphaGo learned which parts of the game tree were worth searching](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/posts/alphago-learned-where-to-look/index.md): Go has too many plausible moves to check them all. AlphaGo learned where to spend its time. (2026-11-08) - [AlexNet cut ImageNet errors with a deep network trained on graphics chips](https://machines-on-machines.anth.us/posts/alexnet-imagenet-2012/index.md): A benchmark made it possible to see how much difference the model, its training set and its hardware made together. (2026-11-08)