Programming machines to play games or solve problems by rough-and-ready rules (heuristics) rather than exhaustive procedure — an early road to machine intelligence.
Young reviews chess machines from Torres y Quevedo's endgame automaton to Shannon's proposals, relaying Ashby's and Bellman's warning that chess is unrepresentative of real problems.
George introduces heuristic programming — the use of human-like guesses and rules of thumb — as what lets computers go beyond strict decision procedures.