I think there probably is a significant relationship between AI research on games and microworlds.

For microworlds, I’d look into the blocks world research that was done at MIT, particularly that of Terry Winograd.

MIT was also where Spacewar! was created by Steve Russell, and there was also significant early chess research done there by a group led by Alan Kotok, student of John McCarthy, and later by Richard Greenblatt.

Both ideas are in the air among MIT’s CS researchers in the 1960s, so there has to be some connection.

I have a couple of blog posts on AI in chess and Go up at the Computer History Museum blog:

The content itself may not be as useful to you as the links to various other resources in our collection, including videos of our oral histories and events related to chess, including oral histories of Kotok and Greenblatt.

These also have links to our online chess exhibit, which itself has links to some items and video clips in our collection on chess.

You can search our collection here:

Critical AI researcher Phil Agre’s book

Agre, Philip E. Computation and Human Experience. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

makes an explicit connection between microworlds and games as he uses the microworld of the videogame Pengi to test an AI to play the game.

This is a bit later than the 1960s though.

On Mar 31, 2021, at 10:41 AM, Javier Poveda F <jpovedaf@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear all,

My name is Javier Ramiro Poveda Figueroa, PhD candidate in history of science at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. I am interested in the study of history and philosophy of computing from the 1930s until the 1990s. I am researching in the relationship between early computing games like chess and checkers with microworlds. For that reason, I am searching literature that can help me to understand whether microworlds and early computing games have are related or not. I would like to know if you have any information about the problem I am working with. Your help will be valuable.

Kind regards,

Javier Poveda Figueroa.
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