Wikipedia
TD-Gammon
TD-Gammon was a computer backgammon program developed in 1992 by Gerald Tesauro at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Its name comes from the fact that it is an artificial neural net trained by a form of temporal-difference learning, specifically TD-lambda.
TD-Gammon achieved a level of play just slightly below that of the top human backgammon players of the time. It explored strategies that humans had not pursued and led to advances in the theory of correct backgammon play.