I know! According to [1] the minimax algorithm does indeed originate here. And Hamming said in that talk [2][3] that Shannon didn't do anything killer after Info Theory...

[1] - http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/the-book.html [2] - http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html [3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw

The really incredible thing to me is that I could sit down with this and write a chess engine using the method outlined here and it would work. This paper is the Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation By Machine of the computer chess world.