My article “Is Chess the Drosophila of AI? a Social History of an Algorithm” (Social Studies of Science, 2012) was recently awarded the 2013 Maurice Daumas Prize by the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC).


The Maurice Daumas prize is “awarded to the best submission of an article on the history of technology published in a journal or edited volume within two previous calendar years.” More information about Maurice Daumas, the pioneering and celebrated French historian of technology, can be found here for those of you who read French. A brief biography in English can be found here.

Receiving the Daumas Prize is a great honor, and I am particularly pleased to see the Chess paper, which is one of my favorite and, I believe, most historiographically innovative articles, receive some attention. The timing is also good, as an excellent new movie about chess and computers has just been released.

For the moment at least, the article is freely available from Sage. If this changes, and you do not have access to the Social Studies of Science archive, you can read draft version of the computer chess paper.