2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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C HESS, GAMES, AND FLIES
1. The Drosophila of AI.
I am writing these lines in June 1997, exactly 40 years after Herbert Simon’s prediction
that 10 years of work would be sufficient to build a computer program that “would routine-
ly beat the world’s best players.” Although it has taken 4 times longer than predicted, it is
fresh news that Deep Blue, a machine developed by IBM, has finally beaten the chess world
champion, Garry Kasparov, in a much publicized event. Simon’s prediction has come true.
Does this mean that AI has finally achieved its goal? Not quite, in fact, not the least because
Deep Blue is not an example of Artificial Intelligence: it uses rather conventional (from
AI’s perspective) programming techniques and gains its strength from the speed of its hard-
ware. In fact, Stephen Coles, when predicting the eventual success of Deep Blue, comment-
ed: “[Simon] will not be happy with the method by which his dream was accomplished—
machinomorphic brute force rather than a stepping stone to a universal set of principles
about human thought processes that would help us scale up to a broader class of intellectu-
ally interesting grand challenges.” 1 Paradoxically enough, we might even say that the suc-
cess of Deep Blue and its non-AI techniques marks the failure rather than the success of
Artificial Intelligence. But how did it happen that the sorts of AI came to be tied to the ex-
ploits of a chess-playing machine? Is it a rather accidental event, as AI researcher have al-
ways claimed, or does it point to a deeper connection? In this chapter, I will address these
questions by providing a conceptual reconstruction of the history of Artificial Intelligence’s
1. L. Stephen Coles, “Computer Chess: The Drosophila of AI,” AI Expert, 9, 4 (April 1994) 30.