Long before Alan Turing designed a machine to crack the Nazi enigma code, or laid the foundations for artificial intelligence, he was an exchange student at Princeton University. He was there to study logic and computation, but also had the chance to attend other lectures—like the one given by mathematician John von Neumann in March 1937, on the theory of games.
Von Neumann’s work had started with a simplified version of two-player poker. Each player put in an ante of $1 then received a single card, which displayed a random number between 0 and 1.